Lizardmen

Before the first man drew breath, before the elves had names for the stars or the dwarfs delved their earliest holds, the Old Ones came down from the heavens and set the turning world in order. The Lizardmen are what those vanished gods left behind — not a race that clawed its slow way up from beast to civilization, but a deliberate work of creation, spawned cold and purposeful from the sacred pools of Lustria to serve a design older than history itself. They do not worship the Old Ones so much as remember them as masters, and every scale, claw, and unhurried thought was shaped to a task set down when the world was still soft clay upon the wheel.

Their home is Lustria, a vast fever-green continent beyond the Great Ocean, where rain-drowned jungle swallows pyramids older than any kingdom of men. Here stand the temple-cities — Itza the First City, sun-blazoned Hexoatl, star-reading Tlaxtlan — ziggurats of carved stone half-reclaimed by the wild, their plazas paced by silent saurus and their inner sanctums home to the slann. Yet even this ancient order is the wreck of something greater. When the polar gates fell and the warp poured into creation, the Old Ones vanished from the world, and their servants were left alone to hold a broken design against the rising tides of Chaos, greenskin, and the ratmen who gnaw forever at the roots of their cities.

The Great Plan

Everything the Lizardmen do serves the Great Plan — the unfinished work of the Old Ones, whose full shape only the slann still dimly remember. Carved into golden plaques and written across the geomantic web of ley-lines that girdles the world, it decreed how the heavens should turn, where the winds of magic should flow, and which younger races were tools of the design and which were errors to be corrected. The slann meditate upon it for centuries at a stretch, reading the constellations and the flaws in the world's weave, and when one of them stirs from contemplation it is because some small part of the Plan has been judged to have gone astray — and must, at any cost in blood, be set right again.

The Castes

Every Lizardman is spawned from the sacred pools to a single purpose, and none ever questions it. The slann are the mage-priests, the living memory and will of the Old Ones and the mightiest sorcerers the world has known, their bloated forms borne aloft upon floating palanquins. The saurus are the warrior caste, cold-eyed killers hatched already knowing the arts of war. The skinks are the small, quick, clever caste — scouts, scribes, priests, and handlers, the busy hands and hurrying voices of the temple-cities. And the kroxigor are the great labourers, hulking brutes who haul the stone of the pyramids and wield hammer and blade in war. There is no ambition among them, and no dissent; only the Plan, and their place within it.

The Way of War

The Lizardmen do not raid for plunder or conquer for glory, for they desire neither. They go to war as a surgeon takes up the knife — to excise something the Plan cannot abide. When a temple-city rouses, it does so with terrible totality: cohorts of skinks flitting through the trees with poisoned blowpipes, phalanxes of saurus that neither break nor tire, and the roused giants of the deep jungle — stegadons, bastiladons, and bellowing carnosaurs — driven into the foe. Above them all a slann bends the winds of magic to his silent will. To the enemy it is annihilation without malice or mercy; to the slann it is merely one more error, corrected, and a return to contemplation.