The Beast Fears Fire - Barghests

Barghests [Malevolence 4]

Impulse – Bring forth evil. We don't like to use the word evil too often around here; even in a world where it has a tangible presence, it gets used a little too often and too freely. Barghests are evil; cartoonishly, haplessly evil. Spirits who are fully manifested in a maleable form that goes between large, nasty looking wolf to werewolf style hybrid, covered in distressed fine fabrics and attenuated jewelry, waves of psychic menace rolling off them like a good stink.

Barghests like to set up shop in abandoned places (country manor houses are their favorites), take on a less flamboyant form and start making trouble. Barghests like authority (they also like food, liquor, nice surroundings, money... You get the idea), so they tend to gather local adventurer-bait to them and set up gangs of bandits or monsters or what have you. Barghests are usually pretty good at subduing other creatures with their magic and browbeating them into doing what they want.

Barghests can alter their appearance to more or less anything they want and usually adopt some sort of disguised form (usually not a specific person, they aren't very good mimics and tend to make up their own identities), and only assume their true appearance when they are being pressed, or want to be dramatic.

Harm – Injury 3, Peril (Despair). Barghests are usually above just tearing their enemies with fang and claw (except when they're not), and use their massive spiritual powers to inflict psychic injuries. Whichever way they go, they've got power to make it very unpleasant for their victims and enemies. Barghests tend to like to maintain whatever disguise they were wearing in a fight until things have swung either for or against them. Barghests unleash a nasty psychic attack whenever they drop their disguise. (A side note, this is common for a lot of disguised evil critters, so expect to see this again)

Behold My True Form – And Despair!
When a powerful being drops its disguise or assumes its monstrous form, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you do not suffer harm, but do suffer peril (in this case, Despair).
On a Hard Hit, you suffer neither; your enemy done goofed – its revelation has given you new resolve to kick its ass, gain a free hit for all moves you make against this enemy for the rest of the scene.
On a Miss, you suffer the peril and the moderator gets to make a Hard Move (usually inflicting Harm as stated).

I don't like feeling nice, I like feeling eevil.

As fully manifested spirits, barghests are vulnerable to all the various forms of physical injury you would want to inflict on them (and you will), but don't suffer from trauma the way creatures that need tissues and organs to function do. Also, they are difficult to kill permanently – beating them down or blasting them with magic will cause them to unmanifest, but they will often return, though it may be decades later, to avenge themselves on your descendants. Rituals to truly destroy a barghest are kind of hard to come by, requiring a lot of hunting for clues, some specialized ingredients, and a reasonable amount of luck. And then you have to catch the barghest.

Barghests are lupine in appearance, but their origins may be human. At the very least, they tend to take on identities of folks from history who were miserable people in life. Of course, whether or not they are telling the truth about their identities or just trolling the people to whom they reveal it is up for debate. If, in our world, you encountered an 8 foot tall, semi-bipedal skeksi-werewolf who claimed to be Hitler, whether or not he really is becomes secondary to the 8 foot tall skeksi-werewolf part.

Barghests like to co-opt goblins for their capers, to the point where there's some confusion as to whether they aren't goblins or somehow associated with goblins. People who make a study of this are pretty sure there is no connection beyond the fact that goblins are convenient minions for a megalomaniac with magic powers, but these are people who study barghests and they are crazy fuckers, one and all.

When a barghest is forced to unmanifest, whether destroyed permanently or not, they leave behind sinistrite, which is a magical material with all sorts of fun uses. People who are into that sort of thing pay well for it.