A Brief Musing on the Grimgully

The grimgully has been in the works for quite a while. Back when I was a budding homebrewer, I was inspired to create a monster based off of the sack man from Bloodborne. You know the one.

Y'know, the sack man.

Anyways, from the start the grimgully wasn’t intended to take characters from place to place. It seemed more like a cool monster in terms of its looks and feel. It does, however, grab people and stuff them in a spooky bag. Enter the other inspiration, our very own James’ boneman. The boneman is basically the kidnapper, except he has a cool collection of zombies and skeletons and everything else that goes bump in the night and he happens to like bringing them around in a potato sack.

To me, pulling things out of a bag seemed all well and good, but what about putting things in the bag? Combining these two ideas, I envisioned a monster with a mobile army and a terrifying weapon - a magical burlap sack full of undead.

There’s honestly not a lot to say about the grimgully. It’s a pretty clean monster - typical undead stuff, a grapple ability similar to the shambling mound, and a pretty mean way to create undead armies. And maybe that’s truly the lesson of this design. If you have a good idea, don’t overthink things. There’s no need to get cute, sometimes it’s just best to execute with honest simplicity.

The grimgully can shake monsters out, grab player characters, and put them in a scary bag. The scary bag is full of necromantic magic and zombies that crush their victim. Sure, the Sack of Corpses and Stuff ability are pretty long, but it’s more just a result of squiffy 5e rules than true complexity. Most of the wording is based off of preexisting monsters anyway! It’s not particularly smart or clever, it’s just a solid idea brought to life with a relatively simple stat block.

-Trent the Sewerman