Lizardfolk: Difference between revisions

<blockquote>“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.