Lizardfolk

With claim to the jungles of the south, the somewhat short yet agile lizardmen train from birth either to become swift and dangerous hunters to support their tribes or to become the mysterious shamans and invoke the force they believe encompasses all.

Physical Appearance
"It took me several months before I started recognising the subtle differences between males and females. — Athane Graymoore, Scales in Lamplight: Mysteries of the lizard folk, page 27" The lizardmen are most similar to humans in their pose, standing tall on two legs and having two arms. They are usually about five and half foot tall and weight from 50 to 60 pounds, being skinnier than humans. Young lizardmen mature earlier than other races, estimated at about 12 to 14 years. Should a lizardmen live long enough to die of old age, he will be around sixty years old when he leaves the realm of the living.

As the only race able to survive in the harsh conditions of the hot and humind jungles and swamps on the very south of the continent, Lizardmen are resistant to the numerous diseases thriving in the area and able to catch even the most elusive prey.

Lizardmen eat much less that other races do, and as a result they are generally weaker than members of other races of about the same age. An exception are their strong, long legs wich allow them to run faster than any other race of Parthos with the exception of centaurs, and help them to be the excellent swimmers and limbers they are. The rest of the body is weaker but still very agile. However, lizardmen are quick to tire under strain.

The whole body of a lizardman is covered by scales of varying size. These provide some protection, but shatter easily and cannot protect against any sort of weapon. The color of the scales is not the same for all lizards - the most common colors are green and beige altough blue and brown also occasionaly appear. Many lizardmen also have various patterns on the skin, ranging from spots to various snake-like imprints.

Religion/Beliefs
"Do not bother to look for any kind of a sacred place in the jungle, you would be wasting your time. For the lizards, the whole world is one big temple. — Fergus of Granitekeep, Pilgrim's Guide to the Southeast, page 80" In accordance to their simple culture, lizardmen know no gods or even nature spirits. Instead, they simplyworship a single living force that encompasses everything: fate, magic, nature, the world and it's denizens. Everything comes from that force and everything returns to it when it ceases to exist. Lizardmen don't have any name for this force - they simply say "it" whenever they are reffering to it.

Ordinary lizardmen never try to adress the force directly, but always relay their requests to a shaman who then performs the necessary rituals. In a ritual, a shaman can plead for almost anything, the most common being good weather, hunt or revealing the future to them.

Fighting Style
"Their skill in throwing stones is mindboggling, if I hadn't seen it in person I wouldn't have believed it. In a fight, they could easily be as effective as our archers. — Athane Graymoore, Scales in lamplight: Mysteries of the lizard folk, page 248" Lizardmen don't make use of any complicated tools. A spear, made by tying a sharp stone to a straight stick, is probably the most advanced tool the lizardmen can make, but simple stones and hand axes are used most often.

However, it's not the quality of tools that is most important for them. From young age, lizardmen have to hunt on their own, using only spears and stones. Failing to kill something means starvation. This quickly leads them to developing uncanny skills with their simple tools and combined with their speed it allows them to match much better equipped foes.

Due to being weaker than most other races, Lizardmen use agility as their main tactic. Their speed allows them to choose the battlefield wich they often use to their advantage. Ambushing the enemy from treetops or from underwater is common, but any cluttered battlefield suits them well. On the other side, flat and open areas put lizardmen into a significant disadvantage, as their mobility finds little use in such places.

Unlike the rest of the lizardmen, a shamans always avoid fights and when pressed into one they try to distract the enemy and disappear as fast as they can. Shamans never accompany common lizardmen into battles, sometimes they wait behind to tend to their wounded and often not even that.

Few lizardmen leave the swamps to roam the human Empire and even fever can defend their lives in the foreign environment. However, those who do survive are quick to learn how to use human tools and weapons. They are almost always looked down upon and most let themselves to be hired as mercenaries or assassins.

Territory
"I'm not surprised the lizard folk wants to expand. I wouldn't want to live in the jungle too. — Athane Graymoore, Scales in lamplight: Mysteries of the lizard folk, page 300" Lizardmen originate from the jungle on the very south-east corner of Parthos. Through numerous conflicts they have gained and lost large areas of land, with most notable victory being cutting the former single catfolk territory in two and the most notable loss being a large territory near their home swamps conquered by the Lynxfolk. Nowadays, their territory consists of jungles, swamps and partially temperate forests, all in the northeast. On the west they share borders with the orc badlands and Lionfolk savannas while in the north they neigbour with the human Empire and the Lynxfolk enclave.

While the lizardmen are usually peaceful, from time to time their territory starts being overcrowded. When this happens, several lizardmen tribes try to move to territory of other races and settle, wich usually gets them in conflict with the local population. This happens fairly periodically about once each sixty years. The last time it happened the lizardmen were brutally defeated by joined forces of the human Empire and the Lionfolk.

Government
"I have never seen any social structure beyond the tribes, but somehow several tribes working together always goes perfectly without any tension. — Athane Graymoore, Scales in lamplight: Mysteries of the lizard folk, page 97" There is no real goverment in the lizardman society, instead the lizards group into tribes. Usually their tribes have 20 to 80 members, very rarely over a hundred. Should a lizardmen tribe grow too big, it splits into two smaller ones of about the same size of wich one will travel to an unoccupied territory. Tribes are usually lead by a lizardmen determined by a challenge of agility. This challenge can take many different forms - it may be a race or a challenge to hunt down a specific hard to catch animal or any other that comes to the mind of an advice-giving shaman. However, lizardmen almost never fight for the position of a chief. Lizardmen from different tribes behave friendly to each other and whenever their tribes cooperate it happens without much friction. This may be both because of different mentality of the lizards and because there simply isn't much to envy, as life of all lizardmen (except shamans) is an endless cycle of hunting, tool crafting and hanging out with the rest of the tribesmen.

Shamans never hunt, but exchange their services for food. They usually heal diseased or wounded lizardmen, though performing rituals, telling fortunes or simply giving advice to tribe leaders is not uncommon. Most of his time a shaman collects various herbs and dries them on peculiar treetop platforms built for this purpose. These herbs, along with some basic magic, are then used for healing.

Shamans usually live alone, away from other lizardmen, and work for many tribes at once. Only a few of the largest tribes have a shaman of their own, who usually acts as the tribe's leader. Whenever a shaman grows old, he chooses a young lizardman as his apprentince and teaches him all his knowledge. The apprentince then takes over the shaman's role when he dies. If a shaman dies without an apprentince to take over or if the numbers of lizardmen grow too high, a shaman might teach multiple apprentinces in his life.

Architecture
"Always accept if a lizardmen invites you to his hive for the night. It may be cramped and dirty in there, but it still better than the thousand of horrors outside. — ergus of Granitekeep, Pilgrim's Guide to the Southeast, page 13" Lizardmen don't have any true architecture as they never build any sort of structures. Often they simply sleep in the treetops. When settling at a place for a longer time, they hollow out a part of a tree to sleep in. These 'hives' tend to be quite small and high over the ground with tiny holes for entrance, so even a very observant person may not recognize them.