Lizardmen
"Civilization must stand up and combat the current collapse of governance, the rise of violence, and the spread of chaos and fear in many parts of the world.""
- – Rudy Giuliani
"A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers. If you don't provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you'll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it's a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you've got it right."
- – James Barrat
"What are you doing in my swamp?!"
- – Shrek
The Lizardmen are a faction in Warhammer Fantasy Battles; with the coming of the Age of Sigmar they have been re-named "Seraphon". A variation on the Lizardfolk theme, they are a civilisation of Mayaincatec, Chaos-hating, reptilian creatures. Prior to Age of Sigmar they were the isolationist survivors of an ancient empire that lived in Lustria, the Warhammer World's analogue to South America. As Seraphon they were reborn as creatures of star magic who live above the Mortal Realms, descending to fight as per the inscrutable will of their masters. They do not have a Warhammer 40000 counterpart, only factions that take after various bits of them.
History
Way back when the Old Ones entered the world, they decided they'd need some extra help in messing this world up guiding this world to its destiny. So, they created the first of the Lizardmen, the Slann. The Slann are obese but highly-magical frog-men that spend most of their days sitting around meditating. The Old Ones, realizing the Slann wouldn't be useful for much when it came to manual labor, then created the rest of the Lizardmen, including the Saurus, Skinks, and Kroxigor. They then left the Lizardmen to make some elves, dwarfs, and humans.
However, the Fall of the Eldar then happe-- wait a minute, wrong universe. Or is it? The dimensional gate the Old Ones had come through collapsed, crashing into the north of the Warhammer World and opening a portal to the Warp Realm of Chaos. The Lizardmen and Elves had to team up to defeat the Daemons that started pouring through the portal. Eventually the Elves managed to redirect the flow of magic into a portal at the center of the island home, Ulthuan, but not before much awesomeness on the part of the Lizardmen. And by awesomeness we mean billions of saurus' fighting for centuries continuously in battles that spanned continents against an enemy that could warp reality. Little did the elves know, the slann actually did much of the work on the great vortex, and without them continuously sending magical aid it probably would have collapsed a long time ago. The slann are also responsible for maintaining the great warding, but don't ever tell the elves that or they'll throw a hissy fit.
Lizardmen for the most part are fairly primitive by the standards of the Warhammer world. Even orcs can take iron and forge it into new choppas and make chariots. Lizardmen mostly use stone tools and weapons with some bronze bits here and there. Only the beastmen are more primitive and they have brains hardwired to despise all that is artificial. This might lead you to underestimate them in battle, but the fact that they use stone swords is a secondary consideration when you consider that the ones wielding them are three meter long semi-sapient therapod dinosaurs with really durable scales. One area where they do make a lot of use of metalworking is in gold plates, which they have a lot of. These they use to keep records and important bits of information on because they live in damp stone cities in the middle of rainforests where paper would fairly quickly rot away. Other species, for reasons the Lizardmen have a hard time understanding, have an odd obsession for this yellow metal beyond simply valuing its corrosion resistance and try to steal these plates to melt them down. This really gets under their scales.
Despite being fairly isolated, they deal with just about everyone. their main problems are emo elves to the north and regular human pirates and colonists. They also have a long-standing feud against Skavens. Recently, the Slann have been getting off their asses and realizing that the threat needs to be met head on, so apparently they have massive armies stationed fighting all over the world, from brettonia to the southern chaos wastes. Why they never pop up in anyone else's fluff is a mystery, though not so much when you realize they barely have fluff to begin with. They are also similar to tomb kings and Grandpa Dreadnought with their "get the hell off my lawn" policies.
The End Times
With the release of The End Times: Thanquol, the fourth book in The End Times series, the Slann forsee that The Great Plan of the Old Ones will fail. The apocalypse begins with the Lizardmen defending their lands from a Daemonic invasion that rivals the initial Chaos Incursion after the Great Catastrophe (somehow, despite the Polar Warpgates not changing and the Elven Vortex still happily sucking up all the Magic). Unfortunately, whilst the Lizardmen put on a smashing show in stemming the Daemons, warpstone meteors rain down upon Lustria; the Skaven Grey Seers had been taught by their Daemonic Verminlords how to circumvent the Slann's magic and try to bring the chaos moon closer to the world. This knocks out all the Slann as they try to protect the continent, just in time for the entirety of the Skaven Clan Pestilens to invade Lustria. As the booby traps set by the Lizardmen are bespoke for Daemons they do nothing to stem the Skaven tide other than giving a few headaches. Cue rampant swarms of rat-men spreading plague, burning forests, and killing Lizardmen like it's going out of fashion.
Clan Skyre, not to be out done by those pesky Grey Seers, decide to go one further and actually blow up the chaos moon with a giant cannon. As continent-sized chunks of warpstone plummet towards the planet the Lizardmen decide that it's very likely their plan has failed and flee in their temple-pyramids-now--spaceships. The Slann use their mind-powers to disintegrate these fragments, however blowing up their brains under the magical strain. Even as the Slann die still more chunks head for the world, taking the mummified uber-Slann Lord Kroak to will himself back to life in order to contain the rest of the chunks to only fall on Lustria and the Southlands, whilst securing parts of Lustria in magical bubbles and lifting them off the world.
As such only a few Slann now exist, floating about in space.
Age of Sigmar
With the release of GW's re-packaged fantasy game Age of Sigmar the Lizardmen have been renamed into the IP-friendly 'Seraphon', and with it have been re-skinned as "Daemons of Order" whose bodies flow with Azyrite energy (i.e. the Lizardmen now have lightning for blood). A Battletome has been released and the army rebased. The Seraphon have no named characters in Age of Sigmar outside of Lord Kroak, with the other characters either being given new, generic units (such as Tetto-Ekko and Gor-Rok), or have been merged with already existing generic units (such as Oxyotl, Lord Mazdamundi, Kroq-Gar, and Tehenhauin).
The new fluff describes the post-apocalypse Slann (now known as Slann Starmasters) as having been found drifting in space by Dracothion, the celestial dragon, and were thus brought to the Mortal Realms. They are described as having an empire in High Azyr (i.e. space) and travel across the Mortal Realms without the need for Realmgates. All the Seraphon bar the Slann are now memories, materialising when the Starmaster wants to beat down on Chaos. Just *how* physical the Seraphon are is vague - despite being described as materialising at the whim of the Slann they have blood of starlight which, in one story, was said to be soaking in the ground to purify it of Chaos' taint. The Battletome also details a Skink Starpriest to approach a Slann before they materialise on the Mortal Realms with the rest of the army, suggesting that the Seraphon may exist beyond the battlefield. To make matters more confusing, the Seraphon also physically manifest as star constellations, with various hosts forming around a central shiny Slann.
Rather nicely the Black Library has given them some attention in the recent short story "Under The Black Thumb"; nice in that the old Lizardmen were usually left in the shadows as the favourite races got all the attention.
Mating Habits
Yes, there's an entire section dedicated to their mating habits. However, while this will certainly disappoint the scalies out there, oddly enough Lizardmen don't have any. No joking. Despite being called Lizardmen, the entire species (or whatever it's called given that speciation is determined by a lack of reliable inter-fertility between two populations) is composed of genderless individuals to whom sexual reproduction is as alien as a 360-degree field of view is to a human.
But this begs a question. If they don't have any functional reproductive organs then how do new Lizardmen come about?
Well, there are big, bubbling pools of murky liquid at the heart of each temple-city. These were created by the Old Ones at the dawn of time and scheduled to produce new Lizardmen on a timetable unknowable to any but the long-gone Old Ones. The rate at which the lizardmen spawn is assumed to be quite high, as they are constantly being worn down in battles of attrition. One source has the pools thrashing non-stop to keep up with a never ending tide of daemons. The new Lizardmen walk fully formed out of the pools and are instinctively able to understand their role in society. They're then toweled off, logged in the records and sent to where they are needed. Each new batch (or Spawning) is usually composed of one specific type of Lizardman and has traits which are distinctly of that batch. Needless to say, as they are the foundation of their civilization, the Lizardmen are very protective of these pools, especially since they can't build more and don't really know how to repair the ones that get broken (usually due to Skaven involvement). If you get close to one (if you get close to one), you will almost certainly get your face eaten. Hey, that sounds familiar...
It should also be noted that all Lizardmen, with the exception of the skinks, are biologically immortal. They don't age, they simply get stronger and more skilled at what they do. So their attrition rates are lower than humans. It also means that the greatest Lizardmen warriors are centuries, if not millenia old and are veterans of thousands of battles. Hey, That also sound familiar...
So to sum up while Lizardmen look, walk and talk like Aztec dinosaurs, they are little more than biological variant of robots: mass-produced, pre-programmed and single-minded. They have little to no free will, no goal in life besides those implanted into them upon spawning, and much like robots they often do stupid things due to logical errors in their programming.
Subspecies
Like Orcs and beastmen, Lizardmen are divided into a number of distinct subspecies, each fulfilling a distinct role in society and in battle.
Slann
The Slann are the obese, magic frogs we were talking about above. They're among the most powerful wizards in the entirety of the Warhammer World. In previous Lizardmen army books, they had a more active role in leading the species, but apparently they are now more sleepy. Also, there are no longer any more Slann being spawned, so the ones a alive are part of a dying species... welp, grimdark. (( End Times spoiler: All the Slanns are dead or gone. Many were killed by skaven after being rendered unconscious from stopping the moon from falling, and the rest either left in their pyramid ships or died blowing up continent sized pieces of the chaos moon that the skaven blew up. Even Lord Kroak joined the party. In Age of Sigmar it's revealed some Slann survived, but their numbers dwindled until only five were left. Lord Kroak is back too. It's uncertain whether he is one of the original five or whether it's Kroak and five other Slann. Honestly not that surprising for Lord Kroak, death is probably just a mildly irritating inconvenience to him.))
Saurus
Saurus are the main footsoldiers of the Lizardmen and, by and large, the "face" of the army. A "face" that could rip a man in half. The average Saurus is a semi humanoid scaled therapod 2.5 meters tall with a bite that can take off a grown man's arm, a tail strong enough to smash their ribcage and scales as hard as chainmail. On top of that, they carry at least a huge Macuahuitl and a bladed shield. They may seem slow and dimwitted, but don't let that fool you, it's not that they're dumb, they just only care about warfare.
Saurus themselves have a few variations, depending on their spawnings. Most of them are regular warriors with colour variations (some of which are taken as signs of greatness, like albinism for Gor-Rok). The two main variations of Saurus are!
- Temple Guard: An elite group of Saurus, spawned to instinctively guard the temples and Slann, their spawning has ingrained this purpose so much they've been know to kill a Skink helper just because he looked at a Slann funny.
- Cold One Riders: Saurus with the ability to get near, control and ride Cold Ones into battle. They produce the same smell as their mounts and have adapted for their feet's claws to grip Cold One' scales more efficiently.
Skinks
Skinks are the smallest type of Lizardmen and the smartest save for Slanns. They act as the farmers, administrators and artisans of Lizardmen society. They are the most versatile and flexible of Lizardmen and probably the one which would be best suited to have a friendly conversation with a Human. Despite their small size (roughly the same as a Goblin), they can be a formidable military force, as they have highly-accurate poisoned blowpipes. They are also the caretakers for most of the dinosaurs used by the Lizardmen, and thus are Awesome. Awesome enough to get their own meme (that didn't really survive through the newer editions): "remove X, replace with Skinks."
Kroxigor
Kroxigor are to skinks what Ogres are to Halflings (at least in the Warhammer World): giant powerful but dumber versions. They're essentially giant bipedal crocodiles who spawned at the same time and in the same ponds as skinks. They're the main workers and builders of the Lizardmen. In war, they work together with Skinks, forming units termed "Skrox" by the fans.
DINOSAWZ
Lizardmen are also known for their use of dinosaurs found on their native continent of Lustria. Thus they have the best monsters and cavalry period. Dinosaurs bitch. Like fucking Jurassic Park.
Stegadons
Probably the most well known dinosaur used by the Lizardmen, this stubborn, motherfucking Triceratops hits like a freight train and can trample all who oppose the Lizardmen underneath his feet. They usually carry Howdahs on their back which include a Skink crew, and a FUCKHUEG bow. As the stegadons age, their tempers cool and they will be able to carry either 2 massive blowpipes which fire buckets of dice, or a mystical Engine of the Gods that can buff, or shoot lightning bolts like a Red Alert Tesla coil. Strangely, it seems to be named after a Stegosaurus or the Stegodonts (an ancient sister groups to mammoths and elephants)...this goes to show how little GW knows about Paleontology, despite seeming more like a Triceratops mixed with an Ankylosaurus and a Styracosaurus. And for more added scientific fail, if you put the name "Stegadon" in biological classification, then it would literally be called "Roofed Tooth" (Tooth: δόντι = Donti | Roof: στέγη = Stegi ), I mean lolwut GW? if you want to name something, at least put a name that would actually make sense in correlation to the creature you are naming it in the first place. On the other hand, it actually makes sense if you take the Howdah into account, which sort of forms a roof over the Dino. (Alternatively: Stega means roofed or covered in reference to either their bony plates, what stegosaurus' were referencing, or the Howdah. Don also means and has genealogical references to nobility and rank. Roughly Covered Lord, ya this is what Latin is like.)
Carnosaurs
This guy is based on the large and awesome theropod dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus, Giganotosaurus, and Allosaurus, and can rip the throats out of Dragons, knocking them down a peg like the pussies they are. The newest version of the model adds additional cool factor by including a killing claw like the ones seen on Dromaeosaurs, such as Velociraptor. Only the beardliest of Saurus can ride them, as even the babies can rip a human in half. Also, they spill blood in the name of the Old Ones and don't give a shit about that pushover Khorne faggot.
Troglodons
Looks like a Blind Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, freaking awesome and anybody would pay money to see it fight a Carnosaur Jurassic Park style. But knowing how it goes, we can see the Carnosaurs win every time since Spinosaurids are weak and dismal. For some reason a Skink can ride them. This is because they team up and search for the lost plaques of the Old-Ones in a 1970's buddy cop film.
Bastiladons
The Lustrian equivalent of Ankylosaurus mixed with a Scutosaurus, the walking tank of dinosaurs, and the first recipient of a 2+ Scaly Skin save. Even a big Dragon, T-rex (ahem, CARNOSAUR), or Greater Daemon sometimes struggle to get through.
Cold Ones
Not to be confused with the Old Ones, Cold Ones are basically velociraptors-like animals that are used as cavalry. They are also used by the Dark Elves, who have much cooler Cold Ones. The official, in-universe explanation for this discrepancy is that the two types are related-but-distinct breeds of Cold One; the cool ones are native to Naggaroth and based off of irl Velociraptors, whereas the derpy ones are native to Lustria and based off of Spinosauroids. But mostly this is due to Games Workshop being too lazy to update old models.
Horny Ones
A relative of the Cold Ones that are rare in Lustria, but prominent in the Southlands (the Warhammer World equivalent of Africa). They are distinguished from their counterparts by the fact that they are smarter, slightly faster and are based upon pachycephalosaurus with sharp teeth. They used to have their own models, known as Tichi-Huichi's Horned One Riders, serving as a unit in Dogs of War armies. Lizardmen mercenaries? Do want!
Salamanders
Not technically a Dinosaur but is still awesome. The models seem to be based off of Dimetrodon (again not really a dinosaur( not dinosaurs at all, but a synapsid )) and shoot flaming poison like living artillery.
Razordons
Looks like what would happen if a Kentrosaurus was on steroids. Shoots out spikes at Sufficient Velocity. Very nasty, and usually has the side affects of being pinned to a wall like a "Lets pin the tail of a Donkey" game.
Terradons
Not a Dinosaur, just an average looking Pteranodon, nothing to look at, but are still useful as fast, flying cavalry. Their new models are also very sexy, unlike their retarded brothers.
Ripperdactyls
Just look at the name. GW is really phoning it in now aren't they. Otherwise, its a Pterosaur similar to the Terradon but with more of a basis in Pterosaurs like Rhamphorhynchus. There are also the shittiest excuse for Monstrous Cavalry ever. Coupled with the shitty name and pretty poor models, there is reason to believe that they only exist to make plastic Terradons a dual kit and to give monstrous cavalry to the Lizardmen since plans for Carnosaur Cavalry were probably scrapped in favor for a new large Carnosaur kit on short notice.
Dread Saurians
Following GW's desire to create big monsters for Forge World to sell, the Dread Saurian was given rules in the Monstrous Arcanum Vol.1 (More was planned, obviously) and was awesome. This thing is larger than even the Carnosaur, is pretty rare and is so powerful that even the Slann can't control it without bedecking it in glyph-inscribed armour. These things are captured, presumably as eggs, and placed inside mountainside Temples, there they are worshipped as a physical manifestation of the Old Ones power. However, when shit hits the fan, a Slann will order a Temples gates unlocked and he'll release the power of the Dread Saurian on Lizardmens enemies. While the Dread Saurians stats are slightly better than a Carnosaur and has the same D3 Wounds bite, it's main power comes from its options (which, for some reason, aren't restricted to just Lizardmen, derp). This includes turning it into a ghost (making it Ethereal), giving it Flaming Impact Hits, putting a huge stone disc on its neck to boost it's Toughness to 8(!) at the expense of 2 less Movement, but probably the most amusing (and something Creed would appreciate) is giving it the Ambushers special rule. Nothing says "fuck your Warmachines" than a T7 3+ monster charging you. All these buffs are named after Old Ones worshipped by the Lizardmen. Stick it in a list with Kroak and watch as it takes down whatever models you want it to. If it dies? Just use skele-frog to summon him back to continue his rampage. Can easily take Alarielle with this method.
This isn't the only interesting thing about it. It had a strange development history. It was released in Monstrous Arcanum Vol.1 before Lizardmen 8th edition by Forge World. In the book, the art depicted it as a sail-less Spinosaurus, yet when the model (finally) arrived, it had lost it's crocodile-like head, got more spikes and was now too-swole-to-control. I asked Forge World's Facebook page (when it had a Q&A) why it changed and was told, simply, "She wanted to change it". While this was a simple answer, it was clearly bullshit, as, when 8th Edition Lizardmen was released, we suddenly had a Troglodon, which was essentially a blind Spinosaurus. What clearly happened was a classic "Failure to Communicate" by GW between it's departments. The artist for FW was told to design a "1UP" of the Carnosaur, so based it on a Spinosaurus, the only known carnivore bigger than a T-Rex, then when the time came to actually design the model, FW learnt that the Troglodon had been designed. Thus, not wanting to make a "1UP" of a brand new model, they redesigned it to what it is now. But it gets more interesting still! In the Lustria Campaign Book, there is a conversion model of an Arcanodon with a EoTG's on top. If you compare the Arcanodon's pose with the Dread Saurian, it's nearly identical.
Fun Fact! The Dread Saurian model is so big, a human-sized model can fit inside its mouth. Conversion time, people!
More Dinosaurs
Since the Lizardmen have pretty much every iconic Dinosaur, the only thing they are missing now is a massive Sauropod like Amphicoelias fragillimus...That . Would . Be . Awesome. A Thunder-Lizard perhaps? Otherwise they could add it as the Arcanadon which used to exist back from the Lustria Sourcebook (although it is still in the fluff.)
There is several mentions of dinosaurs that the Lizardmen have, which don't have rules or models. Pliodons are described acting as "living ferries across the wide canals", while Voxosaurs "emitted their piercing screams to sound alarms" - A bit like a rooster, I imagine. Apt. As mentioned, the others are Thunder Lizards and Arcanadons.
See Also
External Links
Gallery
-
Look into this frog's eyes. He's half-asleep, probably drunk, and he's still going toe-to-toe against a Lord of Change in a magic fight.
-
A typical Lizardmen city.
-
Please GW. I beg you. ADD THIS (Even if it's ripping off Dinotopia, with some change it'd be a good original idea)
-
Even Lizards need to beat one off sometimes.
-
Lizard woman are lesbians!?
-
Seraphon riding Derpasaurus
