Necrophages - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Database

Seen a lot o’ ugly critters in me life - morays, lampreys, blobfish… But never nothin’ like this!
– Bjorg, Kaer Trolde shipbuilder

An alghoul’s basically a badarse ghoul
– Yarpen Zigrin, dwarven warrior

Alghouls differ from normal ghouls in size, strength, coloring and, most importantly, intelligence. Whereas ghouls and graveirs are primitive creatures unfit to plan even the simplest ambush, alghouls and their kindred (such as cemetaurs) are capable of forethought, and are thus much more dangerous.

When at the water’s edge, you gotta be quiet. First of all, so as not to scare the fish. Second – so you don’t attract drowners.
– Yanneck of Blaviken, fisherman

A drowner resembles a corpse dredged from the bottom of a pond. It is sickly blue or green in color, with slime and sludge oozing out of every pore and the acrid stench of rot wafting off of it. That is why it is often thought drowners - along with their more dangerous cousins: vodniks, mucknixers and drowned dead – arise from the bodies of those who drown in shallow water: lost travelers falling into bogs, children who swim too far from the shore or, in the case of vodniks, inebriated peasants who stumble off narrow swamp trails.

If night ever catches you in the swamps, stay put and wait for dawn, even if it means standing waist-deep in water with leeches crawling down your trousers. Most important of all, if you see a light in the fog, never, and I mean never, go towards it.
– Johannes Strudd, guide

Fog is the traveler’s foe. In the forest, it can make one lose one’s way , at sea, it can send one sailing into the rocks. Yet such dangers are nothing compared to the monsters known as foglets which sometimes lurk within it. These creatures have powerful arms and claws like Zerrikanian kinjals, yet what makes them truly dangerous is their mastery of deception, beguilement and disorientation. Many times they need not attack at all, instead simply driving their prey to madness or into boggy marshlands, after which they wait patiently for it to drown in the muddy waters.

Ghouls creep and crawl at night
Eating everything in sight
In a snap they’d eat you, too
Chop you up for a ghoulish stew!
– Children’s rhyme

Ghouls and graveirs are hard to describe. In part, they resemble humans - yet on the whole, they are the utter negation of all that is human. Though they have arms and legs like men, they walk on all fours like dogs or badgers. Though they have eerily familiar faces, one searches them in vain for any sign of sentiment, reason or even a spark of consciousness. They are driven by one thing and one thing only: an insatiable craving for human flesh.

*Cremation, now that’s one thing men could learn from gnomes. Burying bodies out in the fields, why, it’s like laying out a welcome mat for monsters! Best case scenario, some ghouls will sniff them out, eat their fill and be on their ghoulish way. But if, gods forbid, a grave hag takes to feeding at your cemetery, you’ll have no end of trouble.“
– *Jacques de Villepin, Oxenfurt Academy

Few monsters’ names fit as well as the grave hags’. As one might guess, these creatures resemble aged, deformed women and loiter near graveyards and battlefields. Grave hags feed on human corpses and in particular on the rotten marrow which they slurp from human bones using their long, prehensile tongues. Once a hag has devoured all corpses within reach, she turns to killing men and burying them in the cemetery as she waits for them to decompose.

Careful, sir, a monster prowls the bog. Enter the mist and ye’ll never see home again!
– Leslav, peat digger

Somebody’s doing some cooking… This… it’s a human femur… a child’s.
– Geralt of Rivia

Course it reeks. Think they’re called rotfiends because they smell like roses?
– Vesemir, witcher of the Wolf School

Rotfiends resemble decomposing human bodies that have been stripped of their skin. Their presence is given away by the overwhelming stench of the rot which gives them their name. Devourers are a particularly dangerous kind of rotfiend marked by an insatiable appetite for human flesh.

Blood and Wine

Thought it was just a pile of rotten meat – till it started to move!
– Thibaut from Beauclair

Scurvers are rotfiends’ larger cousins. The bodies of these hideous, vaguely humanoid creatures are covered with rotten scraps of flesh, under which lurk even more rotten muscles stretched around a strong, flexible skeleton. Scurvers, which feed on old, rotting corpses, prefer to make their hunting grounds in abandoned torture sites, forgotten graveyards and old battlefields. They are very aggressive and, though they feed on corpses, if they come across a living person they are likely to attack. Thus when wandering near any of the above-mentioned places, one must be especially cautious.

Blood and Wine

The best defense against spotted wights? Stay calm and leave them alone.
– fragment of a treatise on spotted wights by Roderick Giligan.

Spotted wights were a subspecies of wight which the witchers drove to extinction. They were larger than their unspotted kin and owed their names to their numerous blotches and effusions. Spotted wights would most often dwell in derelict cemeteries and empty wildernesses, yet at times took to living in abandoned human domiciles. There they would indulge in their greatest passion: creating brews from their own emissions.

When not disturbed, spotted wights would not act aggressively. If threatened, however, they became very dangerous indeed. In the colder months or when faced with an unseasonable chill, they would slip into a state of lethargy, making them easy targets. Even during their active periods, it is said the witchers found a surefire way of besting them, based around careful casting of the Yrden Sign – or at least, so claims witcher lore…

Folk say water hags are drowners’ wives. If that be true, ‘tain’t no wonder why they’re such ornery bitches.
– Shemhel of Dregsdon

Some tales mention water hags and swamp bints masquerading as lost old women to lure travelers back to the rickety shacks they build in the wetlands. In truth, only a blind man, or a sighted man blinded with drink, could mistake the rank sludge and rotting carrion of a water hag’s den for a cozy cottage, and the hideous hag herself for an innocent grandmother. Their wrinkled, wart-covered bodies stand nearly two yards tall, with skin the color of a long-dead cadaver and stinking of muck and fish. Bony growths two spans long stick out from their backs, with hair like a tangle of seaweed and claws that would make a werewolf proud completing the picture.

Blood and Wine

They say the dead like quiet. I don’t know about the dead, but wights certainly do.
– Heinrich Von Grott

Though wights are ghastly and threatening in appearance, one should not approach them with sword drawn or attack them unprovoked. Left alone, they present no serious danger to anyone and are far more interested in mixing noxious brews in cauldrons than in fighting. This species mainly lives around ancient burial sites, though they have also been spotted near more recently-founded cemeteries and wherever mass graves can be found.

Wights spend the winter months in a state of lethargy very similar to human sleep. They live strictly solitary lives – in fact, it is practically unheard of for these creatures to appear in groups. Yet when they fear their territory is threatened (and it is enough for one to step foot in a wight’s territory for it to feel threatened), wights transform into dangerous foes and even abandon their solitary ways to summon other monsters to their aid.