User blog comment:4Ferelden/Mook showdown - ME adversaries vs. other games!/@comment-2250460-20130506141236/@comment-4721065-20130507085651

Well, sort of. Since the Ties that Bind ended up being the last game in the series after Surreal Software sold out to Midway Games just two years before it was brought down by GFC, a lot of stuff wasn’t fully explained. The picture I get is that for each type of Malefactor to spawn, two things are needed; a) a particular type of suffering has to have occurred at that location (i.e. Slayers need either decapitation, or extensive history of knife crime) b) a so-called Prime, a person with semi-psychic abilities and usually disturbed mind, seems to be needed to trigger mass outbreaks (the protagonist in the original and TTB is one, but unconnected outbreaks have also occurred earlier.)

As such, ridding the area of Malefactors MIGHT be as easy as destroying said Prime, but otherwise the only proven way is to destroy or cleanse places associated with the given type of suffering. Thus, later in the game you halt the spawnings of Festers by torching the wreck of the slave ship (it doesn’t kill ones who are already on the island, mind you) and you also see a tunnel where two guards are fighting a group of Slayers that respawn as soon as they gun one down, and the only way to stop them is to roll a boulder to cover the spawning point.