Khumat

"More arms for my chains? More entrails for my dinner?"

- The khumat jailer

A khumat was one of the shadow beasts, a class of outsider native to the Plane of Shadow. It was a ferocious crocodilian.

Description
The khumat resembled nothing so much as an upright, bipedal crocodile, with the crocodile's head and long tail mounted on a powerfully muscular, humanoid body. It was covered in thick green scales, especially over its back and tail. Its arms have massive claws and its huge maw contained sharp teeth.

Abilities
Hideously strong and hard to kill, the khumat's thick scaly hide provided it with nigh-invulnerability to mundane weaponry, as well as good resistance to acid, cold, electricity, and fire damage. It was also immune to poisons and resistant to spells.

It was a naturally talented swimmer.

Combat
How a khumat fought its foe depended mostly on how good it looked to eat. It would happily bite a humanoid or animal, but preferred to slap its tail against aberrations and extraplanar beings. If biting, it could grab and hold a victim in its jaws, and thereafter savoring crushing them to death in its mouth. Either tactic was devastating.

Lands
Khumats lurked in the murky waters and stinking swamps of the Plane of Shadow.

Personality
Although known to be dim-witted, khumats were nevertheless vicious and cunning hunters who could obey orders well.

Society
On their own, khumats mostly swam through the swamps of the Shadow Plane in search of prey. They and other shadow beasts also happily served powerful Shadow Plane warlords, such as cloakers, dread wraiths, nightshades, and those humanoids who settled there. They also came to the Material Plane to serve as mercenaries or soldiers for evil lords who hired them. Although their home was in the water, khumats were at ease marching over land.

The three breeds of shadow beast had an uneasy relationship with one another. Although they did not war against each other, they also would not fight together in the same troop. Nevertheless, they occasionally cooperated when on the Material Plane. Khumats were better able to cooperate with ghirrashs and with thaskors, than ghirrashs and thaskors would with each other.

They usually hunted alone, but in armies they might be found in squads of two to four or in companies of up to twenty members.

All of them spoke the Abyssal, Infernal, and Common languages.

Notable Khumats
By the Year of Lightning Storms, 1374 DR, a khumat had been forced into serving some shadar-kai. It was made to work as a jailer at the Lost Refuge in the Vast Swamp, but did so without complaint, as it was permitted to devour lizardfolk prisoners who died in its custody. It was presumably slain when adventurers in service to Mystra assaulted the base in early Eleint and rescued the lizardfolk.

Appearances

 * Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave