Well, if you remember the barrel's in tutorial that you opened, you could could also give it a wack (melee) to break it open, a chest is same thing. It's an NPC, but it just doesn't fight back, haha
One example is NPC race - chest (378 ), or a box (376) or coffin (382), etc, etc. then just setup a loottable for them, just like any other NPC and/or put them on a quest script, etc.
The gitbook wiki has a good race list here :
https://eqemu.gitbook.io/server/cate.../npc/race-list