# Race: Lizardfolk > [!info] Quick Facts > | | | > |---|---| > | **Rarity** | Rare | > | **Perception in Gryth** | Negative. Their cold reasoning reads as menace to outsiders. | > | **Subraces** | [[#Frill-Necks\|Frill-Necks]], [[#Gatorfolk\|Gatorfolk]], [[#Sandscales\|Sandscales]] | > | **Guide Section** | Rare Races | ## Overview Lizardfolk are native to Fangrum, in [[Continent - Q'Shar|Q’Shar]]. They are pragmatic to a degree that other peoples find unsettling, reasoning from cold logic and an instinct to feed and protect the tribe. A lizardfolk who declines to grieve is not being callous; the concept simply does not arise. ## Ssillarn and the Black Eyes Lizardfolk keep Ssillarn, the Great Marsh God, and have done since before any surviving record. Their devotion is as practical as everything else about them: the marsh provides, the marsh is owed, and Ssillarn is the marsh. What complicates it is the kenku, whose god Tifi-Tif, the god of Black Eyes, has been at war with Ssillarn for longer than either people has been able to write the fact down. Both races hold the same valleys of Q’Shar, and the skirmishing between them there is constant, inherited, and not about anything in particular. It is understood on both sides as a continuation rather than a dispute. A lizardfolk will tell you, without heat, that the matter will be settled when one god finishes the other, and that this is unlikely to happen in anybody’s lifetime. ## The Tribe is the Unit A lizardfolk does not think of themselves first and the tribe second. The tribe is the thing that continues; an individual is a part of it that happens to be alive at the moment, and will not be later. Every decision a lizardfolk makes is weighed against what the tribe gains, and nothing else is weighed at all. This is why their reasoning strikes outsiders as monstrous. A tribe that cannot feed everyone through a lean season will decide who eats, calmly, in open council, and the ones who are not fed will take part in the discussion. They are not being brave. They can see the arithmetic as clearly as anyone else at the fire. Possessions are held the same way. A lizardfolk will give away a weapon they spent a year making without a flicker, and take one from a corpse without ceremony. What belongs to the tribe is used by whoever can use it best. Outsiders who trade with lizardfolk usually come away feeling they have been robbed, or else feeling they have robbed somebody, and are often wrong on both counts. ## Empire at the Waterline Q’Shar is no longer a quiet place to live. The [[Region - The Tohon Empire|Tohon Empire]] has spent the last century turning itself from an island into an empire, [[Faction - Evereach Trading Company|Everreach]] pushes into every basin and channel it thinks holds anything worth taking, and both of them want coastline. Lizardfolk swamps sit exactly where coastline becomes something else, and the tribes have found themselves pressed from the water inwards. They have adapted to this in the way they adapt to everything. Some tribes withdrew deeper into country that ships cannot follow them into. Some trade, carefully and on terms that surprise the traders. A few have hired themselves out, on the sound reasoning that a tribe paid to fight is a tribe being fed. The settled powers of Q’Shar have learned that a lizardfolk contract is honoured to the letter and not one word beyond it, and that a lizardfolk who concludes the arrangement no longer benefits the tribe will say so and walk away the same afternoon. ## The Wet-Fanged Lizardfolk, like every beastfolk people, are trafficked. The slave markets of the north and west have taken them for generations, out of Q’Shar by ship and inland by cart, and a lizardfolk is a valuable piece of property anywhere work needs doing that would kill a human. They are strong, they do not tire, they need very little, and they do not complain. What they also do not do is obey, reliably or for long. A lizardfolk slave will work faultlessly until the arithmetic changes, and then stop. Traders price this in. Buyers generally do not, and lizardfolk pass through more hands in a lifetime than any other stock on the block. Where they are genuinely prized is the sand. In Bonedagger they are called the Wet-Fanged, and the name has spread to the other Grand Arenas and out into common speech beyond them. The depraved humans who run the island’s arena discovered what every slaver eventually discovers, which is that a lizardfolk who has decided a fight is worth having is not fighting the way the crowd expects. There is no fury in it and no showmanship, and it tends to end early and badly for whoever is standing opposite. The bookmakers hate them. The crowd adores them. Wet-Fanged who survive long enough to be worth more alive than dead are sometimes freed, sometimes traded on at enormous expense, and sometimes simply walk out one night without hurrying, having concluded that the tribe of one they now belong to would benefit from being elsewhere. ## Far From the Marsh Lizardfolk turn up in three places outside their own swamps, and all of them are telling. In the [[Region - The Bleeding Isles|Bleeding Isles]], where a pirate’s race counts for nothing and status is earned through stories and loyalty to a gang, lizardfolk have found a society organised on principles they recognise: a crew is a tribe that chose itself. There are lizardfolk in the gangs of [[City - Darkport|Darkport]] who have never seen the marsh their grandparents came out of. The largest population outside Fangrum is on the [[Region - The Amber Coast|Amber Coast]] of [[Continent - Iros|Iros]], where lizardfolk run a good share of the gambling dens and trade hubs alongside the other beast races who came over from Q’Shar. The other is [[Region - Gizanth|Gizanth]], a mist-shrouded island elsewhere in Q’Shar, where lizardfolk tribes hold parts of the ancient marshlands apart from the island’s other peoples. Nobody is sure when they arrived, including them. Since Everreach burned the island’s coasts, the Gizanthi lizardfolk have been as hostile to outsiders as everyone else there. ## Lizardfolk Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Your Constitution score increases by 2, and your Wisdom score increases by 1. **Age.** Lizardfolk reach maturity around age 14 and rarely live longer than 60 years. **Creature Type.** You are a Humanoid. **Size.** Lizardfolk are a little bulkier and taller than humans, and their colourful frills make them appear larger still. Your size is Medium. **Speed.** Your walking speed is 30 feet, and you have a swimming speed equal to your walking speed. **Bite.** You have a fanged maw that you can use to make unarmed strikes. When you hit with it, the strike deals 1d6 + your Strength modifier slashing damage, instead of the bludgeoning damage normal for an unarmed strike. **Hold Breath.** You can hold your breath for up to 15 minutes at a time. **Hungry Jaws.** You can throw yourself into a feeding frenzy. As a bonus action, you can make a special attack with your Bite. If the attack hits, it deals its normal damage, and you gain temporary hit points equal to your proficiency bonus. You can use this trait a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest. **Natural Armour.** You have tough, scaly skin. When you are not wearing armour, your base AC is 13 + your Dexterity modifier. You can use your natural armour to determine your AC if the armour you wear would leave you with a lower AC. A shield’s benefits apply as normal while you use your natural armour. **Nature’s Intuition.** Thanks to your mystical connection to nature, you gain proficiency with two of the following skills of your choice: Animal Handling, Medicine, Nature, Perception, Stealth, or Survival. **Languages.** You can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. ## Subraces ### Frill-Necks Frill-Neck lizardfolk are slighter than their common cousins and avoid a fight where one can be avoided. When it cannot, they are precise about it. The frill gives them their name: a broad sail of skin around the neck that flares out to twice the width of the head. It is used to frighten predators and, rather more often, to settle arguments among themselves without anybody having to bite anybody. They keep to the drier ground at the edges of the Fangrum swamps, where the marsh gives way to firmer land. **Rarity:** Very rare **Perception in Gryth.** Negative. As lizardfolk generally, and with the added difficulty that the frill is the first thing anyone sees and the last thing they forget. #### Frill-Neck Traits These traits replace the Nature’s Intuition and Hold Breath traits of the common lizardfolk, and you have no swimming speed. **Ability Score Increase.** Your Dexterity score increases by 2 and your Wisdom score increases by 1. This replaces the common lizardfolk’s increase. **Venomous Glands.** You know the *poison spray* cantrip. Constitution is your spellcasting ability for it. **Flaring Sails.** You gain proficiency in the Intimidation skill. **Lightweight.** While wearing light or no armour, you can move across the surface of water without falling through, provided you end your turn on solid ground. **Quick Step.** Your base walking speed increases to 35 feet. ### Gatorfolk Gatorfolk are far larger than most people realise lizardfolk can be, and they are used accordingly. Where a tribe needs something broken, a gatorfolk breaks it. The reputation as brutes and enforcers is not a slander so much as an accurate job description. They share the swamps with the common breed and have made a specialism of hunting there, using deep water and close ground to end a fight before it becomes one. In a straight contest of strength there is nothing else in the lizardfolk line that comes close. **Rarity:** Rare **Perception in Gryth.** Negative, and with more fear in it than the common breed attracts. A gatorfolk is generally assumed to be somebody’s muscle before anybody asks. #### Gatorfolk Traits These traits replace the Nature’s Intuition trait of the common lizardfolk. **Ability Score Increase.** Your Constitution score increases by 2 and your Strength score increases by 1. This replaces the common lizardfolk’s increase. **Lockjaw.** When you score a critical hit with a melee weapon attack, you can roll one of the weapon’s damage dice one additional time and add it to the extra damage of the critical hit. You can use this with your Bite; if you do, add the maximum result of the extra die instead of rolling it. **Death Roll.** When grappling, you count as one size larger. You also have advantage on ability checks made to prevent a grappled creature from escaping. ### Sandscales Sandscale lizardfolk live in deserts that would be uninhabitable to almost anything else. A fire genasi would think twice about the country they call home. Because of those conditions rather than despite them, they have become ruthlessly efficient hunters. They bask through the day or work the twilight hours, and they are very difficult to see against sand at any distance. They are the only lizardfolk not native to Q’Shar. The sandscale breed is found in the deep deserts of Iros, and how they came to be there is not a question they consider worth discussing. **Rarity:** Very rare **Perception in Gryth.** Negative. As lizardfolk generally, in the few places anyone has met one. #### Sandscale Traits These traits replace the Hold Breath trait of the common lizardfolk, and you have no swimming speed. **Ability Score Increase.** Your Constitution score increases by 2 and your Dexterity score increases by 1. This replaces the common lizardfolk’s increase. **Desert Mirage.** You have advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks made to hide in sandy or rocky terrain. **Desert Born.** You are immune to the harmful effects of extreme heat. ## Connections - [[Continent - Q'Shar]] — Homeland (Fangrum) - [[Region - Gizanth]] — Lizardfolk tribes hold parts of the ancient marshlands - [[Region - The Amber Coast]] — Largest population outside Fangrum - [[Continent - Iros]] — The Amber Coast; Sandscales in the deep deserts - [[Region - The Bleeding Isles]] — Lizardfolk in pirate crews - [[City - Darkport]] — Lizardfolk in its gangs - [[Region - The Tohon Empire]] — Expansion pressing on lizardfolk swamps - [[Faction - Evereach Trading Company]] — Pushes into Q’Shar's basins and channels; burned Gizanth's coasts --- ## Gallery ![[Race - Lizardfolk.jpg]] --- *See also: [[Races]]*