Oh yikes. Thats exceptionally nasty.
This does explain why even the Paladin stayed way clear of them.
The Ghouls are even more like an adventuring party than first assumed.
They even respawn.

Or more likely. Someone or something recreate them.

Tobi seems to have found the opposite: the ghouls don't try to kill her but almost everyone else does. (Though perhaps encouraging her to play this game was a way of killing her.)
Presumably the ghouls kill in the hope of gaining XP - experience points - and the paladins have misinterpreted this as killing "for the experience of doing so" in the sense of enjoying it.
I wonder whether the ghouls are people from Tobi's world who think that the world they're currently in is a dungeon and that the people they find are monsters (literally - not just nasty people). Though Tobi didn't think this when she found herself here. Maybe they're people from Tobi's world who've gone mad from being trapped here for decades.
Or maybe people in Tobi's world exploring dungeons - including Tobi when she was still there - always have been going through this 'real' world as ghouls, with a vision filter that displays people as monsters.
Or maybe the ghouls are the result of an experiment/enhancement within the 'real' world. The people raiding the castle in Burk's story may be ghouls - they certainly have horns and regenerative abilities. But those ones seemed to be more aware of the politics of this world, while the ghouls Tobi met seemed to be more like her, e.g. in ear and hand appearance and seemingly in familiarity with dungeons.
And I also wonder about the nature of reality between the different worlds - this is the world shared with Burk and Noah, and the temple system seemed to think that this world is the real one and that Tobi's was a game. On the other hand, Tobi managed to retain the abilities (and indeed the objects that she was carrying) that she had in her native world. Maybe the people who made the temples thought they were making a game but actually made portals to another equally-real world (or maybe even to several such worlds). King seemed to know what was going on, as did the people who inadvertently got Tobi into this mess.

Monsters which act like adventurers.

Her black eye keeps switching sides.

That's a nicely terrifying description of ghouls. I hope we see more of them.

The ghouls are very interesting. It is pretty clear they think of the world as a game, but it is pretty clearly a different type of game than the one tobi was in. Their game works on more dnd style rules with multiclassing, where tobi's game had you pick one class a time but you could respec easily.

My original thought was that they were corrupted versions of whatever tobi is, but the differences in game system say to me they are different. I wonder if they are from a hacked version of tobi's game? Maybe hacked by the smile foundation?

My guess is, just like Tobi is someone who *entered* Rauel improperly (by being born, presumably) and *left* properly (through the temple), the Ghouls are people who *entered* Rauel properly (through the temple) and *left* improperly (no idea how).

Miss Paladin's narrative here seems dehumanizing (or "depersonizing" I guess) to the point of unbelievability.

So Ghouls are murder-hobos? Sounds like a typical party of Player Characters to me.

But I think they just recognize that Tobi isn't an NPC. I mean, weird hands, pointy ears, unknown abilities, and talks like she's from another world. And she's got a min-maxed companion to boot. Definitely PC material.

Unlike everyone else in there, Tobi is from a world with "game rules", like the ones the ghouls follow. Different rules, by the looks of things, but still. They probably see Tobi as a fellow player-character, and everyone else as expendable NPCs. They even seemed to know something about the way Tobi got here.

It's interesting to see how horrifying an xp-farming PC can look to the people around them.