Wallara

Wallara, also known as Chameleon-Men, are a species of Lizardfolk native to the Orc's Head Penninsula of the Savage Coast in Mystara, one of the oldest settings of Dungeons & Dragons. One of the oldest races in Mystara, if not the oldest, these seven-foot-tall reptilian humanoids descend from Mystaran dragons, and have become arguably the most obscure of the Mystaran PC races, as playable stats for them only ever appeared in an issue of Dragon Magazine and in a single obscure splatbook.

They once possessed a mighty civilization, but fell afoul of the paranoia of the aranea of the Herath Empire; in those primeval days, the wallara prized the collection of knowledge for its own sake, and so had become aware of the fact that the lords of Herath were, in fact, sorcerous spiderweres. Terrified that the wallara would reveal this information, the aranea sought to cast a spell to wipe this information from their minds - unfortunately, the spell worked too well, reducing the wallara to Stone Age primitives - up until it was retconned in the first Orc's Head Sourcebook, they were unable to even think of advancing beyond that state, and even with the retcon, they spent many centuries incapable of rising above their lot. Now, they exist as nomadic hunter-gatherers or primitive agrarian villages in the northern grasslands of the Orc's Head Penninsula.

Unlike other lizardfolk of the time, who were called "lizardmen" despite having males and females, the name "Chameleon-Men" is well and truly justified for the the wallara: they're an all-male species who rely on magic to propagate. 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 5% 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 magic-based propagation keeps the wallara's numbers quite low and encourages them to protect the delicate magical balances of nature.

Wallara PC stats first appeared in Dragon Magazine #186, under the Basic D&D system, which is when their territory and culture were first detailed as part of the Voyage of the Princess Ark. They were updated to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition in the Orc's Head Sourcebook.

Despite being explicitly a form of lizardfolk, wallara traditionally look exactly like Australian Aborigines painted up in rainbow-colored ceremonial corroboree paint, complete with flowing hair and beards. Not helping was their cultural writeup in Orc's Head 1 essentially boiled down to a straight-up, stereotypical rip-off of Aborigine culture, complete with taboos against smiling when you approach the village and fear of the pointing bone/stick. Now, /tg/ pretty much hates /pol/, but even so, this was enough to make most neckbeards go "seriously? You're kidding, right?" Even if it's not quite as /pol/ in America as it is in Australia, the simple fact that you have lizardfolk, complete with shedding skin, who look like humans with huge bushy afros and long flowing beards, just makes people go "what the fuck, how are these guys lizardfolk?"

TSR finally caught on and retconned the wallaran appearance 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. But, it was too little, too late, and so the wallara seem doomed to languish in obscurity forever more.

This is a real shame, as even if the cultural aspects and original appearance were on the nose, they are still one of the more unique races from early D&D - lizardfolk tend to have an association with primitivism and druidism anyway, yeah, but the wallaras actually had a rationale for it that wasn't "our god Semaunya is stupid and we're fanatics", and their magical method of propagation was quite unique. Add in their connection to dragons, and you could easily spin wallaras into something more like the traditional elf: a long-lived, mystical race that is intimately tied with nature and has a very good reason to dedicate itself to nature's protection.