David Millians

Tswo-shen are Kralori ghosts, a vast and diverse category of entities, a selection of which is given below. The general term is “tswo-shen,” though the less inimical forms are not usually referred to in this pejorative manner.

Most such creatures are at least semi-corporeal but tend to be lightweight and eat very little. There are various ways of identifying tswo-shen. Most cast no shadows and wear garments with no hems. Some are near-sighted, and some turn fires green.

Many Tswo-shen can change shape, and the most common form is a dark cloud, especially by daylight. Others can take multiple human forms, assume beast shapes, change gender, or even remove body parts and send them roaming about. Possession is a common general trait of ghosts, but many desire direct interaction with mortals.

Tswo-shen are more frequent around crossroads, taverns, inns and other places of comings and goings. Ghosts can find people in bed more easily if their shoes are lined up neatly.

A variety of tricks can be used to ward against or drive off tswo-shen. Their efficacy varies from one situation to another. Dogs and some other animals are better at sensing ghosts than are people. Fireworks and other loud noises frighten ghosts. Spit, jade, glutinous rice (especially thirty-six pieces), grinding teeth, and willow branches or wands tend to block or harm ghosts. Folklore claims that red shoes or underwear stops or captures them.

An encounter with a ghost can leave a lingering or permanent effect, depending on the suffering of the victim and degree of success of the ghost. Some types of ghosts are passive or even pleasant.

The brief descriptions below cover only a few of the types of undead known in Kralorela. Even within these types, there is wide variation.

Aunties – These ghosts of elderly, commoner women return to work in houses like where they lived and worked.
Significant Abilities: Bad Luck, Clean, Spooky

Baby Eater – Women that died in childbirth or that suffered in a childless marriage can return as Baby Eaters, malevolent ghosts that wither the flesh of infants.
Exceptional Abilities: Haunt Nursery, Suck Away Infant Flesh

Banana Tree Lady with Baby – These ghosts seem to be nature spirits; perhaps from forests of long ago, though some Kralori claim they are deceased prostitutes. Banana tree ladies are only found in Boshan Province. They are not dangerous and can sometimes be tricked into giving lucky advice.
Significant Abilities: Cute Baby, Know Lucky Advice, Low Class, Talk for Hours

Bird – Bird ghosts are dangerous entities. They are as large as horses and have nine heads and feathers of many pale hues. They often draw carriages. Sometimes they grab people in their beaks, carrying away their souls, but even the touch of one or its feather is enough to kill someone. They are thought to be the suffering ghosts of servants of Emperor Mikaday. They usually haunt remote places and ancient ruins.
Legendary Abilities: Seize in Beak, Swirl of Feathers, Touch of Death

Butterflies sometimes represent or are ghosts. They are benign, often beautiful or melancholy. They tend to flutter about a place of significance to the deceased lovers.
Significant Abilities: Beautiful, Melancholy

Cannibal – When someone dies while eating human flesh, he becomes a cannibal ghost. Some say ghouls also become these maleficent creatures when they die.
Significant Abilities: Bite & Tear, Hunger for Human Flesh

Castrated – When a man dies without his genitalia, he becomes this kind of ghost. Most eunuchs keep their severed organs in a small jar, to be buried with them, to avoid this fate, so such ghosts are rare. They are mostly pests but can become harmful when truly desperate.
Significant Abilities: Caper Unnervingly, Steal Male Genitalia
Exceptional Abilities: Grope, Stalk Man

Deceiver – This is another name for Hai Noo.

Drowned – Kralori that drown often return to kill others in the same way. Even far from water, they can drown their victims, filling their lungs with water and absorbing life from them, sometimes even regaining their own mortal existences, often forgetting the evil interlude in their lives. Of course, at least one other person has replaced them in their deadly role.
Exceptional Abilities: Drown Victim, Forget Past

Excrement Eaters – The ghosts originate in the death of speakers of ill words. They haunt latrines and the fringes of villages, hungering for others’ waste. They pose no immediate danger to mortals, but their foul behavior soon leads locals to try to drive them off.
Significant Abilities: Eat Shit, Moan Eerily, Noisome Smell, Play with Excrement

Foreign – These ghosts assume a wide range of forms but always look strange to Kralori eyes. Some obviously originate from Teshnos, Pent, or other nearby lands, but some have extra limbs, bizarre features, and mysterious powers. All, though, fill viewers with a sense of dread, and many can instill their evil attitudes in mortals, leading to sinful thinking and bad behavior.
Significant Abilities: Babble Incoherently, Dreadful Appearance, Instill with Vice

Friends – Underworld officials in need of extra training are sometimes sent to the mortal world to watch over an individual. This seems to occur at random. Their assignment usually includes observation and lending help, preferably without drawing any attention to itself, though these are not the Underworld’s most skilled officials.
Significant Abilities: Be Subtle, Lend Luck, Watch Carefully

Frog – These annoying spirits are apparently ancient and cthonian in origin. They inhabit the corners of rooms, often the northern corners. They tend to come in noisy groups, requiring offerings or exorcism.
Significant Abilities: Croak Annoyingly

Ghost Mother – Some of these beings are primeval and very powerful, but most seem to be fragments of the souls of women that feel responsible for the deaths of their children. A ghost mother appears to be a normal, pregnant woman and gives birth to ten children at a time, tends them, coddles them, loves them, and then eats them all in the same evening. These spirits pose no direct threat to mortals, but their disturbing actions can drive some to madness.
Significant Abilities: Horrifying Behavior

Girl Wraith – A girl wraith seems to be a form of Double. It is projected by an ill girl and takes the form of a beautiful woman, who leads life of perhaps many years but eventually re-merges with her original self, often just as she dies. The girl wraith may not even be aware of her origin.
Exceptional Abilities: Beautiful, Cultivated

Green Dwarf – These strange creatures occur singly or in small groups. They are the ghosts of some of the ancient inhabitants of the eastern world and still linger in a few places. Their actions tend to be mundane and innocuous, but some of them engage in bizarre or dangerous behavior. Some say they are a part of their souls given up by draconic Kralori.
Legendary Abilities: Hide in Forest, Observant, Stalk Prey, Withering Touch

Hair – These weak but unpleasant spirits frequent stoves and fires used for cooking. Folk scholars claim they are the ghosts of those unsatisfied by their own or others’ cooking or who died while cooking, often from a fire.
Significant Abilities: Spoil Taste of Food, Stink of Burnt Hair

Hanged – Hanged ghosts are the spirits of executed criminals and dangle from trees with bent, stretched necks and long, red tongues. They grab travelers with their claws and strangle them to death, absorbing the life energy and growing stronger. This often creates another, weaker hanged ghost.
Exceptional Abilities: Grab with Clawed Toenails, Strangle with Feet

Headless – Such entities are usually the ghosts of the beheaded. Some seek their own heads, and others will eagerly replace their head with that of another.
Significant Abilities: Seek Head
Exceptional Abilities: Frightening, Sever Mortal Head

Hopping – These ghosts are non-corporeal versions of the hopping corpse, and many specialists think that they are the product the same processes, some resulting in the physical form of the actual corpse, others the spirit. They feed on the life force of mortal victims.
Significant Abilities: Hop in Pursuit, Smell Living Breath
Exceptional Abilities: Drain Energy

Host – These rare ghosts manifest at night and create the illusion of a fine house and host or hostess. After a night of hospitality, delights, and even physical pleasure, the victim wakes beside or in a grave. Locals usually know the story of the ghost’s origin and avoid its deserted habitation, but travelers can stumble into its magic, and they often leave the experience suffering from madness or other personality quirks.
Exceptional Abilities: Heighten Emotion, Hospitable, Illusory Home, Seduce

Hungry – Ancestors without descendents, criminals, foreigners, and others can all become hungry ghosts. They seek nourishment of any kind. Some are scoundrels and a nuisance, while others are malevolent and dangerous. Some can breathe fire or have other strange, unique abilities. Significant Abilities: Breathe Fire, Curse, Devour, Hungry

Husband – If a betrothed man dies before marriage, the families will often seek to finalize the marriage. The woman is now married to a ghost until her own death. Most of them find this situation quite undesirable, but the marriage is legally recognized and any attempts to circumvent it will arouse the anger of the ghost husband, society, and the government.
Significant Abilities: Haunt Bedchamber

Inanimate Objects – Ghosts of all eras have chosen to haunt or become trapped in mundane objects. In folk tales, these range from simple tools to swords, machinery, and buildings. They bear some similarity to the poltergeists of the west. Some are quite powerful.
Significant Abilities: Make Appropriate Sounds, Move

Leering Faces – These ghosts occur individually or in groups. They typically haunt desolate places, seeking no more than to terrify passers-by.
Significant Abilities: Leer Terribly

Long Hair – These are the ghosts of those that died in a room with a broom. They are a particular nuisance.
Significant Abilities: Moan & Whine, Tangle Hair

Loyal Wife – Loyalty is a prized trait in Kralori society, no more so than for wives. Some of these women, however, are so devoted that they return as ghosts after their deaths to tend to their families. Even if the husband, children, and other relatives might be initially delighted to see their loved one, it is unnatural and dangerous for the long-term health of all those around her. She may eventually fade away on her own, or she may have to be exorcised. Even as she goes about her duties, she will be gradually pulling her closest kin into Hell.
Exceptional Abilities: Dutiful, Kill Slowly, Loving, More Beautiful Than Ever

Lust – Rapists, sexual deviants, and the lascivious in general can become lust ghosts. They lurk in dark corners and drive mortals to commit the same crimes. Even after they are driven away, they can leave their victims permanently affected.
Significant Abilities: Heighten Lust, Inspire Sexual Deviance

Mountain – These curious entities are found only in the central and southern provinces. They are black and hairy and look like monkeys or small, ugly men. They often have but one leg, and they eat crabs and live in trees. If they find out a person’s name, they can cause that person harm, but they are otherwise harmless. Nicknames and the like are not effective.
Significant Abilities: Possess a Single Trait, Severe Itching

Old Amahs – The souls of loyal servants sometimes return to the mortal world to continue their work. They do not necessarily dwell in their former homes. They appear and do housework, tend children, and perform other basic tasks. Households often appreciate their efforts, but they almost always wish for their departure.
Significant Abilities: Clean Home, Comfort Child, Ghostly, Tend Infant

One-Eye – Kralori necromancers classify these ancient, evil spirits as ghosts, but they bear more resemblance to demons of some kind. Sometimes they appear as no more than a baleful eye in brown mist, but they can take the more material form of a cyclopean giant.
Legendary Abilities: Choking Fog, Crush Underfoot, Death Gaze, Fade Away, Horrifying Presence

Pacing – These strange beings wander indecisively in meadows and fields in central and northern Kralorela. If bothered, a pacing ghost takes the form of a colorful snake with two heads and attacks. It is poisonous, but if it has been unable to bite its targets after three tries, it bites itself to its own destruction.
Exceptional Abilities: Poisonous Bite

Paper – The Kralori create these spirits when they make paper sacrifices for their love ones. Some such creatures, unable to find their target in the Underworld, try to serve other ghosts or wander about unhappily in the mundane realm.
Significant Abilities: Flutter in a Breeze, Carry Ghost Message, Whine Piteously

Pregnant, Benign – A woman that dies during pregnancy can become this kind of ghost. She comes by day to buy food for and feed babies using what turn out to be Hell Notes. If mortals can find her grave, they can uncover a living, perfectly normal child within; the child she never bore.
Significant Abilities: Love Babies, Wealthy

Pregnant, Malign – On the other hand, a woman that dies in childbirth sometimes returns as an evil ghost. She seeks pregnant women and babies, often in their homes, to suck their blood until they die.
Exceptional Abilities: Smell Infant, Smell Pregnancy, Stalk, Suck Away Life Blood

Premature Burial – Those interred before their time lurk below the surface of graveyards and attempt to pull mortals down below. They usually strike at night, and little more than their hands and arms is ever seen.
Exceptional Abilities: Pull Down

Red Face – These alluring, crimson spirits, known as Yow Jing, lure men into frequent sex and exhaust them until dead. These sirens originate in the overly lusty behavior of mortals.
Significant Abilities: Ravish, Seductive, Strong

Shoe – These nuisance ghosts lurk at thresholds and are thought to be the spirits of lazy or wronged servants.
Significant Abilities: Soil Feet, Steal Shoes

Sickness – There are many, many kinds of disease in Kralorela. Each has its own legion of spirits, some weak, a few terribly powerful. All serve Jeng Ho Moo, a Sekeveran demon lord.

Snow – These are the ghosts of those that have frozen to death. They are most common in Shiyang Province and Chern Durel.
Exceptional Abilities: Bitter Cold, Freezing Snow, Obscure Pathway

Still-born Child – The ghosts of babies seek out their own and new mothers and then drain their lives away, leaving little more than a husk.
Exceptional Abilities: Smell Infant, Weaken Baby, Weaken New Mother

Suffering – These souls dwell in the hills, moaning and sniveling. They may be a form of Hungry Ghost, but they are more innocuous.
Significant Abilities: Moan, Snivel

Suffocation – Ghost such as this appear as a white sheet or blanket and always seek to choke the life form their victims. They may result from mortals dying from asphyxiation, or they may just be residual energy from such events.
Significant Abilities: Gasp Malevolently, Suffocating Embrace

Suicides – Self-destruction creates a particularly unpleasant, potent ghost. They vary widely based on their abilities in life and the form of their deaths. A few examples are given below:

Drowned in a Well Exceptional Abilities: Drown, Induce Despair, Hate Men, Moan Hauntingly

Jumped from a Height Significant Abilities: Crumble Edge of Precipice, Push Mortal

Poisoned Exceptional Abilities: Poison Food, Poison Water, Spoil Food

Tall – These tree high ghostly entities originate in children who spoke ill of parents. They have tiny mouths and spit their teeth at those mortals they encounter.
Significant Abilities: Hard Skin, Kick with Clawed Feet, Spit Sharp Teeth

Tea – Such ghosts sell poisonous tea to force mortals to join them.
Significant Abilities: Hard Bargainer, Poisonous Tea

Thunder – These noisy, filthy ghosts live in trash outside house walls. They come from the dead souls of people of the same nature.
Significant Abilities: Noisy, Smelly

Tongue – Its long tongue hanging to the ground, this ghost seeks the flavors of the mundane world. The area around a tongue ghost is usually quite barren. When such a ghosts encounters a new taste, it will lick it relentlessly and may lap a thing completely away. These ghosts occur in all parts of the empire except the north.
Significant Abilities: Lick, Taste

Tree – Kralori lore says these are the ghosts of dead prostitute, but they are actually a form of dryad driven mad by their isolation from the great forests of the east eons ago. They linger in small groves, especially at night.
Exceptional Abilities: Crush & Strangle, Murderous, Seductive

Unmarried Daughter – A young woman that dies before her engagement will continue to seek a husband under some circumstances. Her family can have her marry a man from another family, suddenly a widow, and then have him marry another daughter of the family. This usually placates the spirit of the dead woman.
Significant Abilities: Anger Household Animals, Extinguish Cook Fires, Increase Family Rancor, Spoil Stored Food, Wail Through the Night

Wanderer – These ghosts frequent marshes and offer help to the lost, usually taking them into the wilderness to die, draining them slowly of their lives as they do so.
Exceptional Abilities: Appear Helpful, Call Mist, Drink Soul, Hide Way

Vengeful Woman in White Dress – These powerful spirits of death appear as white-faced women with fabulously long, bone-white hair in pale, trailing robes. They suck the life from men and are extremely rare.
Exceptional Abilities: Devour Life

White-Hair – This wrathful man demon hides its evil nature at first by appearing and behaving as a classical scholar. When he then attacks his victim, his long, ropy hair springs forth from beneath his cap, claws emerge from his fingertips, and his writing brush becomes a sword.
Exceptional Abilities: Strangle with Hair, Surprise Attack, Sword Fighting

Wronged – Some souls must seek redress before they can pass onto the Underworld, and they take the form of these ghosts. Only a fragment of the person remains in the mortal world, however, and this often limits the ability of the ghost to interact with mortals, much less take action. Many can only appear as hazy figures, perhaps performing or miming some significant action, in the hope that someone will address their need. They figure often in popular magistrate stories.
Significant Abilities: Give Clue, Manifest in Mortal World