Threat Assessment: Rakghouls

Another blast from the GSA past, I wrote these up a few years back and given their origins in such classic monsters as the vampire and the zombie, I think All Hallow's Eve is the perfect time to have these nasty creatures rise from the grave to yet again menace unwary groups of player-characters in Fantasy Flight Game's Star Wars RPG system.

Rakghoul (Minion)

Characteristics

Brawn 3, Agility 3, Intellect 1, Cunning 2, Presence 1, Willpower 1

Skills (Group Only)

Athletics, Brawl, Perception

Abilities

Rakghoul Disease (see below)

Soak Value:4

Melee/Ranged Defense: 0/0

Wound Threshold: 6

Equipment: Claws and Teeth (Brawl, Engaged, Damage 5, Crit 3, Pierce 1, Vicious 1)

Rakghoul Fiend (Rival)

Characteristics

Brawn 4, Agility 4, Intellect 2, Cunning 3, Presence 2, Willpower 1

Skills

Athletics 1, Brawl 2, Perception 1

Abilities

Adversary 1, Rakghoul Disease (see below)

Soak Value: 6/0

Melee/Ranged Defense: 0/0

Wound Threshold: 16

Equipment: Claws and Teeth (Brawl, Engaged, Damage 6, Crit 3, Pierce 1, Vicious 1)

New Ability: Rakghoul Disease

Spend a Triumph generated from a successful Brawl attack that inflicts damage to infect the target with the rakghoul disease, an incredibly virulent contagion that all but dooms most beings into eventually becoming a rakghoul itself.

Every 24 hours after being infected, the target must make a Hard Resilience check.   A failure means the disease still lingers, inflicting a single wound (this bypasses the victim's soak value).  If the check is failed and generates three Threat or a Despair result, the victim is immediately transformed into a rakghoul, which is a permanent condition and cannot be cured.  A successful check means the disease was not able to take hold and the target suffers no lingering after-effects.

Curing this disease requires a Daunting Medicine check, unless the person treating the disease has access to rakghoul serum, in which case the difficulty is reduced to Average.  However, given the rarity of rakghouls in general, getting access to rakghoul serum can be an adventure in and of itself.  A character that has been successfully treated through the use of rakghoul serum is considered to be inoculated against the contagion, and can no longer be affected by rakghoul disease.

Background: The hideous result of a virulent disease that has plagued worlds such as Taris, the rakghoul truly is an abomination and affront to nature.  Created by the deranged Sith Lord Karness Muur, the rakghouls were his means to achieving power over his fellow Lords of the Sith during their time in exile from the Old Republic.   While a resurgence of the monsters occurred during the Mandalorian Wars, by the time of the Galactic Empire the rakghouls had been all but exterminated, a process that was ironically sped up by Darth Malak’s order to conduct an orbital bombardment of the planet Taris in an attempt to kill the Jedi Bastilla Shan and the amnesiac Revan. 

Still, the creatures managed to persist in small pockets of the Outer Rim Territories, with sentient species being their preferred prey.  Those that survived being slain and devoured by the monsters were invariably transformed into rakghouls themselves by the disease inflicted by the creature’s claws and bite.  While a cure for the disease was developed during the Jedi Civil War, knowledge of its existence has become almost as rare as the rakghoul itself, only rarely is the modern medicine of the Clone Wars era or later able to prevent the infection from transforming those poor souls suffering a fate worse than death.