Lizardfolk

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Off by one

cool way to do that, i like reptillians with beards, final fantasy did that well

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Amazon is a good lizard man

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Best one I got.

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What kind of culture should I give the lizardmen in my campaign setting? I don't like the savage swamp-dweller thing.

Desert nomads. That's what I plan on doing for my setting.

Celtic druids.

Egyptian expy culture would work understandably well. Reptiles being cold-blooded they'd naturally gravitate toward Sun-worshipping.

They’d have a big river network forking through their desert and they’d build their settlements all along the riverbed and take communal dips into the water at the start of each day and sunbask in the afternoon.

Reminds me a bit of Ivalice's Bangaa race. Will post what I have.

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This is all I got.

The lore behind them isn't super-interesting. IIRC, they live longer than humans, are highly social and intelligent, but have trouble casting magic because their mouths make it hard to speak spell words. They don't like being called "lizards".

I just really like their aesthetic.

No bully lizard!

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Most recent lizardfolk threads have been pretty sensible, so I'd be dissapointed.

Aztecs.

The little tail cushion gets me every time.

I like this image except for the extra arms which are weird.

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People always tend to lump "lizardmen" into one overarching race which I think is weird, since there are a million kinds of reptiles. I feel like it would be similar to putting together everything from a cat and a dog and a sheep and calling them "mammalmen".

With that being said; What's the best overarching archetype for the proto-Lizardman body? Monitor? Chameleon? Gecko? Skink? Salamander? Crocodile? Dinosaur furry thing?

I tend to go for Feathery Dinosaur. You can give them all sorts of colors which can tie into personality, plus you can do the Cockatoo thing where their feathers crest in different ways to show their emotions.

I like space lizards, especially ones that are big and beefy like this lass.

Never got the swamp thing, wouldn't that be more appropriate for salamander people, not lizard people?

It's more for that feel of prehistoric jungles

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Atavistic, Orderly, terrifying.

Looking at a Lizardman city should feel like you are walking into a world from another time.
They should feel like they belong to an era when reptiles ruled the world.

They should be orderly, not savage. Not awfully advanced technologically but culturally, think old high cultures.

I personally like not tying them to a biome but give them a larger area they inhabit. Maybe a far away continent, an isolated country.

Think a place that looks like its from another time aswell, conifer trees and volcanos a planty, ashy wastes, deadly fumes with brooding mountains rising in the distance.

i mostly go with something that doesnt realy look like any *specific* reptile but rather a thing of its own.

Look at the bangaa postd here, they dont look liks ome kind of lizard.
Imo consistency makes a race feel real.
I personally enjoy them having a flatter head, larger easy to identify scales , a strong body built that can stand relativeley upright but walks slightly hunched over.

Maybe a mixture of monitor lizard, some serpent like qualities and Cordylidae

basically "what looks cool"

Basically Romans whose entire society revolves around the conquest of all other tribes and governments in their region.

Neat, where did these come from?

Terra Battle; a mobile game.

i tink its a card game like thing, some weeb either mobile or f2p game.

whoever made it definitly played a lot of final fantasy tactics advance cause these look a lot like bangaa

i agree with this.
Prehistoric romans

The guy that made it is Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy.

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Precious

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>Prehistoric romans
Shit mang, that would be terrifying
Imagine an 8 foot, 400Ibs mass of teeth, claws, and mail like scales
Now imagine a few dozen of them together
Now imagine they're all slowly marching towards you hidden behind ridiculously large shields formed into a testudo

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And their dicks are out
Two to each man
Barbed and wet

Please take it to trash, bruh

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Thats pretty much what pic related are, just with added in kung fu and necromancy

i always liked that picture, im a fan of lizards teaming up with other evil races, beats em beeing savages for one thing.

IDK why DnD hasnt managed to make em coherent yet.

Lizardmen could realy use a Monomyth, just like everyone knows what the baseline for elves and dwarves is. At this point they are a standard fare fatnasy race.

Yeah, unfortunately, the closest thing we've gotten to a monomyth in D&D for lizardfolk is that they were originally a divinity named Kecuala, partner to the hermaphroditic divine beast Semuanya. However, whereas Semuanya was content to live the life of a beast, thinking only of hunting, basking, sleeping and mating, Kecuala constantly thought about its environments, until it split into the first male and female lizardfolk. As such, they demonize intelligence, preaching that only when they achieve a purity of thoughtless instinct will their race re-merge back into Kecuala again. That's why they have achieved bugger-all in any setting, because they want to avoid having any kind of real civilization.

Seriously, what the hell kind of racial myth is that? This is so many levels of stupid it hurts to even contemplate!

Do you know how many playable renditions of Lizardfolk we had in AD&D? And this garbage was the best they could come up with for them? Sheesh, this might actually be 5e gnoll-lore tier rubbish...

Huh, that's the first I'd heard of that.

The problem I find is that you get lizardmen that have too human characteristics. They can't express emotions like humans can, they don't have the anatomy for it.

By Monomyth i mean a "generic" lizardman that is what underlies them in most settings.

And actually theres a lot here.
For example, DnD aside, most Lizardmen are blue, most of them are religious, most of them build temples, a lot of them ride dinosaurs, most of them are lawfull, most of them are also neutral, few of them are battlemages, few of them are paladins, a lot of them are shamans or warriors, most of them dwell in Jungles or Swamps, a few dwell in deserts etc.

there are a few more interresting things. Lizardmen gods are almost always abstract, very few are tangible.
Almost all Lizardmen were created by "aliens" or some othe rold race, be it the old ones in warhammer, the sarrukh in DnD, the Shissar in Everquest, the Hist in TES etc.

there a surprising ammount of overlap but its never been categorized.

Id say DnD lizardmen are just SHIT, they have very little thought put into them and the hwole Semuanya deal just seems like an excuse to be lazy.

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Lizard men should have all kinds of lizardthings, lizard runes and lizard tongue, lizard language and lizard art, lizard weapons and lizard gods and be endless sources of lizard mystery.

D&D just makes them primitive brutes, which is fairly boring.

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kind of my point. the Semuanya thing is not "lame" in itself, but it leads itself to lazyness where they dont need to flesh em out at all.

I also dont like how the entire sarrukh thing was basically dropped in recent editions.
That was pretty much the only thing connecting DnD lizards to those in other settings

I need bulky lizard guys in regular european plate armor, if anyone has any

Sarrukhs were a Forgotten Realms specific monster, and many other settings have practically no connection to that setting.

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Casual Wednesday

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Lizardfolk strike me as the type of people to be really into house music.

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lizardmen = crocs
Crocs like swamps, ergo, lizardmen like swamps

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