Lizardfolk

Only a fool looks at the lizardfolk and sees nothing more than scaly humanoids. Their physical shape notwithstanding, lizardfolk have more in common with iguanas or dragons than they do with humans, dwarves, or elves. Lizardfolk possess an alien and inscrutable mindset, their desires and thoughts driven by a different set of basic principles than those of warm-blooded creatures. Their dismal swamp homes might lie hundreds of miles from the nearest human settlement, but the gap between their way of thinking and that of the smooth-skins is far greater.
Despite their alien outlook, some lizardfolk make an effort to understand and, in their own manner, befriend people of other races. Such lizardfolk make faithful and skilled allies.

Alien Minds

The lizardfolk's reptilian nature comes through not only in their appearance, but also in how they think and act. Lizardfolk experience a more limited emotional life than other humanoids. Like most reptiles, their feelings largely revolve around fear, aggression, and pleasure.
Lizardfolk experience most feelings as detached descriptions of creatures and situations. For example, humans confronted by an angry troll experience fear on a basic level. Their limbs shake, their thinking becomes panicked and jumbled, and they react by instinct. The emotion of fear takes hold and controls their actions. In contrast, lizardfolk see emotions as traits assigned to other creatures, objects, and situations. A lizardfolk doesn't think, "I'm scared." Instead, aggressive, stronger creatures register to the lizardfolk as fearsome beings to be avoided if possible. If such creatures attack, lizardfolk flee, fighting only if cornered. Lizardfolk aren't scared of a troll; instead, they understand that a troll is a fearsome, dangerous creature and react accordingly.
Lizardfolk never become angry in the way others do, but they act with aggression toward creatures that they could defeat in a fight and that can't be dealt with in some other manner. They are aggressive toward prey they want to eat, creatures that want to harm them, and so on.
Pleasurable people and things make life easier for lizardfolk. Pleasurable things should be preserved and protected, sometimes at the cost of the lizardfolk's own safety. The most pleasurable creatures and things are ones that allow lizardfolk to assess more situations as benign rather than fearsome.

Cold and Calculating

Most humanoids describe cold-blooded people as lacking in emotion and empathy. The same label serves as an apt depiction of lizardfolk.
Lacking any internal emotional reactions, lizardfolk behave in a distant manner. They don't mourn fallen comrades or rage against their enemies. They simply observe and react as a situation warrants.
Lizardfolk lack meaningful emotional ties to the past. They assess situations based on their current and future utility and importance. Nowhere does this come through as strongly as when lizardfolk deal with the dead. To a lizardfolk, a comrade who dies becomes a potential source of food. That companion might have once been a warrior or hunter, but now the body is just freshly killed meat.
A lizardfolk who lives among other humanoids can, over time, learn to respect other creatures' emotions. The lizardfolk doesn't share those feelings, but instead assesses them in the same clinical manner. Yes, the fallen dwarf might be most useful as a meal, but hacking the body into steaks provokes aggression in the other humanoids and makes them less helpful in battle.

Utility and Survival

The lizardfolk mindset might seem unnecessarily cruel, but it helps them survive in a hostile environment. The swamps they inhabit are filled with a staggering variety of threats. Lizardfolk focus on survival above all, without sentiment.
Lizardfolk assess everyone and everything in terms of utility. Art and beauty have little meaning for them. A sharp sword serves a useful and good purpose, while a dull sword is a dead weight without a whetstone.
Lizardfolk see little need to plan more than a season or so into the future. This approach allows them to maintain their current level of influence in the world, but it limits their growth. Lizardfolk have no interest in developing writing, making long-term plans, or cultivating other methods to progress beyond their simple existence as hunters and gatherers.

Hapless Soft Ones

At their core, lizardfolk view other humanoids with an indifference verging on pity. Born into the world lacking stout scales and sharp teeth, it's a wonder they have managed to survive for so long. The typical human would barely make it through a day in the swamps.
Still, if other creatures prove useful to lizardfolk, those creatures can trigger a protective response made all the stronger by their apparent weakness. The lizardfolk assess such beings as hatchlings, young ones incapable of protecting themselves but who might prove useful in the future if they receive care.
Lizardfolk Personality. You can use the Lizardfolk Quirks table to determine a personality quirk for a lizardfolk character or to inspire a unique mannerism

Civilization and Culture

History

Living mostly in the marshy areas of Faerûn, lizardfolk are large, scaly humanoids who are savage marauders and scavengers. They have no traditions for cultivating food, so they arrange their meals by either hunting prey or raiding the larders of others.
Lizardfolk grow to between 6 and 7 feet tall, and weigh between 200 and 250 pounds. Their scales range in color from dark green to gray to brown. Their thickly muscled tails run from 3 to 4 feet long. Most nonlizardfolk have a very hard time telling the difference between males and females, but the lizardfolk have no such troubles, of course.
Lizardfolk young are hatched from eggs, which are carefully protected in the tribe’s lair. This is usually hidden deep in a swamp, but about a third of the time it’s an air-filled underwater cave. Hatchlings grow to maturity within about five years. Lizardfolk have been known to live as long as 80 years, although it’s common for the males to die in combat long before they reach such an august age.
In Faerûn, lizardfolk are found anywhere there are temperate or warm marshes and swamps. This includes the Deepwash, the Flooded Forest, the Marsh of Chelimber, the Marsh of Tun, and Rethild, the Great Swamp. A large population of lizardfolk is also found in the Lizard Marsh, despite the relatively cold climate of the Sword Coast.
Lizardfolk have the same life expectancy and age categories as humans.

History

Lizardfolk don’t have anything in the way of a written history. They claim that they were among the first of the humanoid races and that all the weaker, more civilized races evolved from lizardfolk who left the swamps millennia ago. The lizardfolk look down on the other races for this reason, seeing them as weaklings who could not endure the rigors of life in the swamp.
In fact, there seems no reason to doubt that lizardfolk are an offshoot of one of the Creator Races, the long-vanished saurians, and that theirs is a very ancient culture. They have lived in much the same fashion they do now for time out of mind, since long before any on the interloper races arrived on Toril.

Outlook

Lizardfolk mostly assess everything in terms of whether or not it is good to eat. They have no use for money or jewels. They fashion their own crude weapons from rocks, trees, and plants found in their wetland homes. If something might be worth eating, it immediately captures the interest of the lizardfolk. Otherwise, it is not worth bothering with.
Growing up in a lizardfolk tribe is hard. The young are often hungry, as they are only giving the leavings of the meals the males capture once the adults are done with them. They often subsist on edible plants found nearby the tribe’s lair. Lizardfolk are omnivorous, although they have a strong preference for meat, and they find human flesh to be the tastiest of all.
Most lizardfolk don’t care much about strategy or tactics. They are cunning hunters, but in battle they simply rush their foe and try to overwhelm him with their superior strength or by force of sheer numbers. When the lizardfolk are attacked, however, they use their skill as hunters to lay snares, pitfalls, and other traps for those who pursue them. Simple but deadly traps such as these protect many lizardfolk lairs.
Lizardfolk sometimes leave their homes to hunt for larger, more formidable prey. Others wish to learn more about the world beyond the swamps, so that they can report back to the leaders of their tribes. While lizardfolk aren’t evil by nature, they are savage, and they have a difficult time assimilating into Faerûnian society. Most don’t even try. They are there to learn about the softskins and perhaps to teach them a thing or two about how real people—lizardfolk, that is—live.

LIZARDFOLK CHARACTERS

Lizardfolk live close to the land, taking all the blessings that nature has to offer them. For this reason, a lizardfolk’s favored class is druid. They also have many barbarians and fighters in their tribes, and the occasional cleric or two.

Lizardfolk Society

The lizardfolk have a patriarchal society. The strongest member of the tribe rules over the others by virtue of his power alone. Most are wise enough to recognize this power, so challenges only happen infrequently. When they do, they entirely disrupt the life of the tribe until either a new leader has been established or the old one has reaffirmed his position.
Lizardfolk females concentrate on hatching eggs and raising the hatchlings. It is also their job to maintain the tribe’s camp. Sometimes this is little more than bits of wet plants the lizardfolk use for beds, but some tribes fashion crude huts and make and use shields and weapons. Some have even learned to use the weapons they have stripped from the bodies of earlier prey.
Mothers watch over their hatchlings closely. In this, they have the help of all female members of the tribe. The hatchlings are often hard to handle, prone to wandering out of the camp and into the wider swamp. At any time, there are half as many hatchlings as there are adults. In a typical camp of 150 lizardfolk, about 50 are adult males, 50 are adult females, and 50 are hatchlings.
As lizardfolk age, they slow down. Over the age of 60 or so, they do not care to do much more than lie on a warm rock and bask in the sun. When these creatures die, they are consumed by the rest of the tribe at a ceremonial wake, their flesh becoming part of the tribe both literally and figuratively.
When wandering outside their marshy territories, most lizardfolk work in small groups of two to three. On rare occasions, one can be found traveling alone. Normally, though, lizardfolk feel the need to have at least one other lizardfolk with them to remind them at all times of who they are. Otherwise, they fear that they might be seduced by the civilized ways of the outside world and never return home.

Language and Literacy

Lizardfolk speak Draconic. The more intelligent ones sometimes pick up Common, the better to frighten potential prey. More rarely, they learn languages like Dwarven, Elven, Goblin, Orc, or the language of neighboring home regions, depending on where they live.
All lizardfolk are illiterate, except for those who have a player character class other than barbarian.

Lizardfolk Deities

Lizardfolk worship Semuanya. Their clerics don’t have true shrines or sacred places, or hold regular services. Instead, they function as shamans, bringing the blessings of Semuanya to the god’s people whenever they are called upon. The god of the lizardfolk is a source of great pride for these creatures. This deity works hand in hand with nature, which helps to explain the great number of lizardfolk druids about. Those who grow up worshiping Semuanya find it easy to make the leap to worshiping nature itself.

Relations with Other Races

The only relation most lizardfolk have with other races is that of hunter to prey. The more civilized lizardfolk realize that the other races may have something to teach them, and they are willing to parley with them—at least as long as their bellies are full. Lizardfolk on empty stomachs are notoriously difficult to reason with.

Lizardfolk Equipment

Lizardfolk use a limited number of weapons, preferring to stick to tools of war they can fashion by hand from readily available materials. They do have one weapon unique to their race, however: the barbed dart.

ANIMALS AND PETS

Lizardfolk don’t raise animals or keep pets. To them, such creatures are for stealing, slaughtering, and eating. On rare occasions, lizardfolk druids use magic to enchant dinosaurs and ride the mighty beasts into battle.

Genetic Ancestor(s)

• Sarrukh

Lifespan

Up to 80 years

Average Height

6′ – 7′ (1.8–2.1 m)

Average Weight

200–250 lbs. (90.7–113 kg)

Average Length

Tail length: 3′ – 4′ (0.9–1.2 m)

Body Tint, Colouring and Marking

Green, black, gray, brown,

Eye color(s)

Yellow