Editing Wallara (section)

==Biology==
[[File:Wallara Dragon 186.jpg|thumb|right|300px|Note that in this picture, the Wallara is the guy throwing the boomerang, not the lizard.]]
Wallaras stand seven feet tall, and their spindly arms and legs make them look quite thin. Some folk think that they resemble tall, slender humans, although this has vacillated for...reasons. They move with a stride that other races find gangling and awkward. Wallaras have multicolored, somewhat scaly skin with stripes of various shades of red, blue, indigo, green, yellow, violet, brown, orange, black, and white. Few wallaras have every hue; most have three or four predominant colors. The colors seem to shift and swirl when they walk; the colors can actually deliberately shift at a wallara's will, which fuels their ability to blend into the background and become virtually invisible - hence their nickname of "Chameleon-Men". Sadly, this chameleonic skin actually endangers them; ruthless [[artificer]]s aware of the fact that wallara skin can be used to make Robes of Blending or other camouflage-related magical clothing have been known to murder wallaras for it. It's possible that wallaras may be willing to trade shed skins that fail to turn into eggs, but it's never discussed in any canon source; a DM could decide that this works, or they could decide that such old skins just aren't magical enough any more.

TSR tended to refer to various humanoid races by the suffice "men", because that was the general linguistic norm where "man/men" meant "people". That's no longer in fashion, but Wallaras would still warrant their nickname of "Chameleon-Men" as they are, biologically, an all-male race. Unlike [[satyr]]s, though, they're actually asexual, as they propagate through a magical ritual. Once a year, when a wallara sheds his skin, he bundles it up and carefully places it within his clan's tookoo, a mystical shrine formed from a magical place in nature. There's a chance that this shed skin will respond to the tookoo's power and transform into an egg, which hatches a new wallara within 8 weeks of being created; this wallara will be a fully functional adult within a year of hatching. This magic-based propagation keeps the wallara's numbers quite low and encourages them to protect the delicate magical balances of nature - the Mystara Monstrous Compendium Appendix states that a skin-bundle has a 60% chance of being transformed into a new wallara, whilst the Savage Coast version instead states that they only have a ''5%'' chance of producing a son each year.

Exactly how or why the wallaras ended up reproducing this way is never explained, which makes it odder given their reputed connection to the [[dragon]]s, who themselves don't reproduce like this.

Wallaras can live for up to 250 years. In AD&D, wallaras over the age of 200 develop a minor level of magic resistance, but this is not reflected in their PC stats.

Initial artwork for wallaras was very unusual; despite their reptilian nature, wallaras were presented as looking extremely close to humans, complete with big heads of bushy hair. Their most visually inhuman trait was their skin, which was a vibrant, chaotic array of streaks of different colors. In hindsight, this... might not have been such a good idea; rather like the infamous [[Kara-Kara|"Polynesian Orcs"]] from the adventure module "[[X8: Drums on Fire Mountain]]", people complained about its perceived basis in racial caricatures. Even TSR thought that this wasn't one of their better ideas, and officially retconned the wallara's look in the Savage Coast Monstrous Compendium Appendix, depicting them as colorfully skinned, tailless lizard-like humanoids, averaging 7 feet in height and with slender, almost gangly builds, sporting small three-clawed feet and dainty, human-like hands, a blunt, expressive reptilian snout for a face, and a short fin-crest running a vertical line down the back of its skull.