Thoughts on Lizardfolk

I've always loved the concept of Lizardmen as a natural sword & sorcery race but never liked TSR's implementation. The lizardmen in 1e lived in huts or mounds in the swamp and might use spears if they were lucky. They seemed based on humanoid alligators which looks really cool but isn't really interesting. I don't mind them in the swamps but if you're going to develop a humanoid shape you're probably gonna adapt beyond such a limited niche. After all reptiles are found in all but the coldest climes. They are in deserts and jungles.

So we have Swamp/Marsh lizardmen as the most primitive aspect of the species.

The pictures in this post are from Groo the Wanderer by Sergio Aragones (as if you couldn't tell from the top one). In that comic they have nomadic lizardmen with a fortification being carried by extra large dinosaurs. The lizardmen clearly do not speak a language used by any of the humans and seem to go about their business somewhat oblivious of those in their way. The lizardmen have what looks like new and well crafted lamellar armor with a vaguely asian look and occasionally have horned helmets*. These lizardmen colored my impressions since 1985, before I ran across Warhammer Armies and their Slann armies with dinosaur mounts.

Instead of having them sling a fortress between super-sized dinosaurs I imagine massive howdah ontop of pseudosaurus (domesticated sauropods of the slow reptile type before Robert Bakker and his theories made dinosaurs impossibly deadly). The lizardfolk are nomads of the beduin type, crossing the desert from settlement to settlement and then moving on. The young and old might live in the settlements and a few strategic ones might have a permanent presence but generally they move on as no settlement could feed the beasts for long.


The Lizardfolk living in the jungles aren't some kind of Aztec/Mayan culture the way they are in Warhammer. They might have built ziggurats and geometric cities out of large blocks of basalt (put in place with pseudeosaurus construction of the Fred Flintstone type) long ago but such ziggurats and the cities that surround them have been in ruins for a long time. The lizardmen still live in the city, but they are semi-savage living in the ruins and not actual city-dwellers.

Oh, and Troglodytes are particularly large Lizardmen and Kobolds are small ones. They live and work among the Lizardmen and just add variety to the culture. These two are mutations that appeared after the species took up worshiping Chaos Gods.



* Despite artistic representations of Vikings I don't believe any cultures actually used horns on their helmets as this would make it easy for an enemy to grab and twist your head. Same is true for ring armor which does not seem to have ever existed (if it did the leather base rotted long before it could find its way to a museum). Such item make nice aesthetic for non-human races (Horned helmets for Lizardmen, Ring Armor for Elves).