You’ll find zimwi, the giant human-lion hybrids that are driven to eat continuously from the Tome of Beast 1. I came across the zimwi while I was updating my article on monsters that swallow in DnD 5e. This creature has very cool lore that makes it a great nasty to throw at your players.
These monsters, which are interestingly classified as giants, are driven by an insatiable hunger. zimwi feel like they are constantly starving to death. As a result, they are constantly on the hunt for food. Their only motive is to try and fill their bellies. They will continue to attack and gorge as long as they have an available food source. The engine for this behavior is very interesting as well:
Stomachs of Holding.
The extradimensional pouch within a zimwi’s stomach makes the stomach serviceable as a bag of holding if treated and enchanted properly. The harder part is relieving the zimwi of its prize.
Tome of Beasts 1 (2023), p.402
Getting a Zimwi into Your Game
One great thing about this creature is the ease that it can be inserted into the game and feel like it has context. It comes pre-baked with a reason why it viciously attacks that feels really intuitive. Likewise, the utility of its stomach gives your players a good reason to tangle with such a nasty critter. They could end up stalking a zimwi to protect a village and find that there’s a prize inside the critter. Or, their efforts to obtain a bag of holding could ingratiate them to the locals who’ve suffered its horrible appetite.
This is the most interesting way I’ve seen to introduce a bag of holding into a game. Often, a bag of holding showing up just feels like an easy way to simplify inventory management. However, with the zimwi, the players have to hunt one of these things down, kill it, butcher it, and prepare the stomach. By the time they’ve got a bag of holding, it feels earned.
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