First off, I want to make clear that at this point my Alternate Ecologies and Necrologies will be a lot less DnD specific from here on in, and just tend to address broader trends and options for the creatures discussed.

Now let's go ahead and get into it. Ghouls are an interesting and complicated subject in fiction and gaming. The modern fantasy conception is of undead creatures that eat people or carrion, and spread their condition via contagion...a person bitten but not killed will become one. The modern 'zombie' of modern zombie movies is in fact usually a form of ghoul. But where did they start? And what else might they be?

It goes back a really long way...ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess of the underworld, Ereshkigal, threatened on at least one occasion that if she did not get her way, she would send up the dead to devour the living. In these ancient traditions, there was a carrion and human eating demon, called the gallu. In some ways it might be considered both a demon and a form of undead, because it was at various points conflated with the dead mentioned above, and was a servant of the underworld and its goddess. So that seems to be the most likely origin.

We can trace the idea as it passes into different traditions. The ghul of Arabian pre-Islamic myth might have been djinn or demon...but it was definitely a thing that lurked in graveyards or by deserted roadsides and ate corpses or unwary travelers. It could shapeshift, taking on the appearance of a hyena, or a donkey...or the form of the last person it ate. Often, even when shifted, the ghul would have some tell tale characteristic that gave it away to a potential victim who was alert enough, like backward bent knees, donkeys hooves, or the like. It was from the ghul that we got our notions of the ghoul in the west, but we of course twisted it to our own understanding. The association with graveyards brought us back around to the notion of the creature being undead.

Lovecraft accessed the idea of the ghoul, and of people becoming ghouls due to horrific practices or some sort of contagion, in several of his stories. Of course, he connected it to his deeply maltheistic cosmology, a 'dark gift' of the hideous Great Old Ones or Elder Gods.

Gygax and company used the idea as well (starting in Chainmail) and seem to have come up with the paralytic nature of ghoul attacks whole cloth, possibly based on the paralyzing fear caused by barrow wights and the like in Tolkien. Elves were immune, because being immortal, they feared death less. (Maybe.)

So right away you see there is a ton of room for variation in ghouls: Are they demons? Djinn? Undead? Creatures from beyond? All of the above, as the demonic spirit from the underworld, once itself a human consigned there, is reinserted into a corpse (maybe its own, but not necessarily) to possess it, and tainted by the power of their dark cthonic mistress? In this way it might resemble a Hindu vetala.

But that's just the possible origin in our world. We can extrapolate from that for different settings or mythic sources. Imagine for a moment, that Ereshkigal is unknown, that all the gods are Greco-Roman. Where then do the hungry dead come from? Easy. The myth of Tantalus tells us that the titular character, a son of Zeus, fed his own son to the gods in a soup. In punishement, they set him in a pool in Tartarus, forver hungering and thirsting, the water escaping as he bent to drink it, grapes above his head pulling out of reach as he strained to grab them. That's pretty easily read as a metaphor. His curse could be the eternal hunger and thirst of a ghoul (or a vampire, but I digress) and passed on to those poor souls he infects, especially if 'Tartarus' isn't a place, but rather a state of punishment, or Hades (or more likely Kore/Persephone) sent him and his minions up as punishment for some slight in the way Ereshkigal might have done.

Though the name comes from Mesopotamia via Arabic myth, hungry dead exist in folklore all over the world, very many of them more likely to eat flesh than merely drink blood the way a vampire does. Some rise simply because they aren't 'fed' enough offerings after their death. The Romans believed this of both manes and lares in various cases.

So in your games or fiction, whatever they be, consider the origin and type of your ghouls and hungry dead, because it can greatly affect how they should be used, and what they mean in context. They don't have to be infected with a contagious disease or curse (though they certainly can), they could be demons, or simply another species that eats carrion (GURPS Fantasy handles them this way), or come back from the dead to avenge any number of things, or simply because they are literally hungry as they haven't been fed. Each one leads to different situations.

For further reading, I suggest GURPS Undead and Zombies by Sean Punch, and GURPS Horror by Kenneth Hite, all three sources really delve deep into origins and meanings of various undead. To see the shapeshifting ghoul, you can watch Supernatural and check out this link.:) https://supernatural.fandom.com/wiki/Ghouls#:~:text=Ghouls%20are%20scavenger%20creatures%20that,humans%20instead%20of%20the%20dead.

As an aside, the brain eating 'zombies' of I, Zombie, in particular, with their ability to gain skills and memories from the brains they have consumed, add a very interesting wrinkle to the mythos, one that I have incorporated in the ghouls for my WIP game, the Hidden Folk, in which they are one of very many character options. It is of note that the ghouls of Supernatural also get the memories of those they eat and mimic.

So, in the spirit of my earlier approaches, lets synthesize a new version for use in fantasy (and urban fantasy) games. The ghoul is, in fact, the spirit of a formerly slain person, often from very long ago. Sent back to torment the living by a dark god or elder thing, they inhabit a corpse. They abduct, kill, and eat people, then masquerade as those people to continue their predations in secret. If they are not careful to eat enough of a victim, they can in fact, infect the victim with a kind of supernatural pathogen, an infectious curse, that brings that victim back as a ghoul...but it is unclear whether the victim is actually the original person or just a demon possessing their corpse and their memory who thinks they are the person, whose soul may well have moved on. Far from mindless graveyard lurkers, these are clever, subtle manipulators who might put even vampires to shame...and aren't even strictly nocturnal. They can take the form of their last victim, for the truly powerful ones, any former victim, as well as often several animal forms, that they likewise had to consume. They possess those victims memories and skills, becoming truly capable in huge numbers of fields over their vast lifteimes. Tantalus is one of the oldest still extant ghouls, and is tremendously powerful.

What do you think?