Lizardfolk

If you are looking for the Warhammer faction, see Lizardmen.

Monstrous humanoids come in many different shapes and sizes across various settings, editions and gamelines. One of the more universal are Lizardfolk - originally known as Lizardmen, but changed during the early 90s, probably for the same reason that Mermaids became Merfolk. As their name suggests, they are a race of humanoid lizards, though they often come in various forms. Generally, though, there's two traits they will have in common; they will be fought in a swamp or marsh, and they will be primitives.

In a world where even gnolls, orcs and goblins manage to cobble together steel weapons to fight with, lizardfolk are usually lucky to wield Stone Age gear like spears and clubs, instead of just ripping things to bits with their fangs and claws. Considering they live in swamps that tend to be home to things like crocodiles big enough to swallow them whole, giant carnivorous slugs, flowers that lay their seeds in your brain to turn you into a zombie propagatory aide, huge crayfish that can snap them in half, giant lumps of swamp muck that hate everything around them, and worse, this makes them either insanely badass or insanely stupid. Maybe a little of both.

Exactly why they're so primitive is never really explained. Dragon Magazine did once do an "Ecology of the Lizardfolk" article, which gave them a religious basis; essentially, in vanilla D&D, Lizardfolk worship a hermaphrodite goddess, Semuanya, who they portray as nothing more than a god-beast - a creature of divine might that concerns itself only with the basic needs of survival, no smarter than any animal. Furthermore, Semuanya once had a mate named Kecuala, who unlike its spouse was actually a thinking creature and so constantly thought about the world around it. Eventually, it thought so much that it split itself into two creatures, one male and one female, so it would be able to properly act on its thoughts. Those two Kecualas were the first Lizardfolk. As a result, lizardfolk literally demonize intelligence as evil, an unnatural and wasteful attribute, and deliberately try to be as feral as possible in hopes of one day restoring Kecuala to life.

Conversely, Pathfinder ties the answer to their environment and biology. They don't breed as quickly or have the same kind of impatient ambition as the warm-blooded creatures, so their population grows slowly and they are more-easily content with meeting their basic survival needs. And because they live in swamps, where metal is hard to get and quickly rusts and cloth or paper quickly rot, they derive less utility from many of the more-obvious trappings of other cultures. Notably, they do actually have a rich tradition of arts and oral storytelling that the more-racist faction that want their land tend to ignore.

The meta-reason is probably related to why the lizardfolk are always seen in swamps. Lizards, like all reptiles, are ancient creatures, tens of millions of years old, and haven't needed to change much since they got the basic template down before the dawn of the dinosaurs. As a result, lizards have a "primeval" motif ingrained in pop culture. So, lizardfolk being primitives just builds on that theme. Likewise, the age when reptiles ruled was a time when the world was covered in lush rainforests, swamps and marshlands, so even though modern swamps are more home to crocodilians, snakes and turtles than lizards, lizardfolk and swamp just go together under that motif.

Despite their mutual reptilian looks, lizardfolk are quite distinct from and not related to Dragons, Dragonborn and Draconians. This is probably because the ancestors of dinosaurs and modern reptiles diverged from each other roughly 285 million years ago during the Early Permian epoch. They do, however, speak draconic, and like kobolds are popular slaves or subjects to various dragons, notably the black dragons that share their environment.

Traditionally, lizardfolk are spooky due to their "coldblooded and pragmatic" mindsets - for example, lizardfolk are usually portrayed as "morally cannibalistic", in the sense that they don't specifically want to eat sapient creatures, but if they do have to kill them for other reasons, they won't waste the protein afterwards - but not actively evil, with their typical alignment being Neutral. However, they also traditionally are prone to the presence of "Lizard Kings" (and, in later editions, Queens); these are demonically corrupted lizardfolk tainted in their egg by the demon prince Sess'inek, granting them significantly increased strength, size, intelligence and ferocity. Consumed by a rapacious hunger for sapient flesh, these Chaotic Evil tyrants drive their followers to uncharacteristic acts of aggression, if only by virtue of the simple fact that if they can't get humanoid meat, Lizard Kings & Queens will happily devour at least two of their own tribe-members a day to sate their appetite.

Unified Setting Description

• Unified Setting/Lizardfolk