Lizardfolk

Lizardfolk are a race of sapient, bipedal reptiles renowned for their speed and strength. Endemic to swamps and other wetlands, lizardfolk tribes generally adopt matriarchal customs due to their unique sexual biology, which includes a "third gender" of larger, stronger, and more intelligent Matrons. Lizardfolk are capable of reproducing both sexually and through parthenogenesis. Young lizardfolk rehearse their mating ritual through the game of male-gathering.

Most Lizardfolk speak Draconic as their native tongue. The Lizardfolk belief system is centered on a creator deity known as The Mother. The poem known as The Saurian Cosmology offers a precis of their creation myth.

Life Cycle

As excerpted from “The Divers Genitaliae of the Lizard-Folk, all Provocative and Discursive Notes and Diagrammes Left Compleat and Unexpurgated, with Novel Engravings of a both Titillating and Educational Nature,” attributed to Pseudo-Reptilicus, from the private library of Lord ————

“Although Lizardfolk often adopt a masculine or feminine affect when traveling among mammalians, the simple male/female dichotomy is not an accurate representation of Lizardfolk sexual biology. A more enlightening paradigm could be borrowed from the social insects. The great majority of "Lizard-men" are in fact female, capable of reproducing both with males and through parthenogenesis. Females can be considered the "worker" or "warrior" caste. Worker reproduction, both sexual and asexual, invariably produces females, with parthenogenic birth producing exact duplicates of the mother. The male is smaller and weaker than the female, and in Lizardfolk society often considered useless except for reproductive purposes - a "drone" caste. Access to males is prized and frequently disputed. The smaller male cadre is held in the thrall of the Matrons - the "queen" caste - a "third gender" of significantly larger, significantly more intelligent Lizardfolk, dominant over their tribes and capable of mating with males to produce both male and female offspring. Rare as Lizardfolk males are, Matrons are rarer still, occurring only when a Matron's egg is incubated at the perfect temperature and humidity in the moist warrens beneath the fens.

For this reason, during the full moon closest to midsummer (the moon being, in traditional Lizardfolk mythology, the egg from which the next world will be hatched), a sacred and unspeakable ritual is held - the Warmest Night. Ancient instinct calls both warrior and drone to return to the swamps, and the mating instinct overrides all other aspects of society, rendering the Lizardfolk tribes into a slick, slithering mass of reptilian bodies, an entreaty to their chthonic Goddess to grant them a Matron. Still, Matron births are rare, and to produce two or three in a year would be considered great fortune in a Lizardfolk tribe of several hundred.

In a certain tribe, the Matrons have passed down a holy fetish for untold generations. A gleaming, emerald egg the size of a Matron's fist, with delicately engraved figures, inlaid with gleaming tumbaga, of Lizardfolk indulging in every possible permutation of their three-gender sexual act. The piece is not of Lizardman make - it was probably granted to the Lizardfolk by a sorcerer of some ancient civilization, one of many forgotten empires that have briefly claimed, on their mammalian maps, to own the marshes where the Lizardfolk have always lived. The Matron's Egg is of chiefly ritual importance, but it does possess a minor enchantment. The air near the egg is cast in a green tinge from a strange glow within the emerald, and always seems slightly warmer and wetter than its wider surroundings, as if in some dank burrow, roiling with scaled bodies - a gift to aid in the birth of Matrons.

Notable Lizardfolk

• Ka-Ess Lizardkin