The Lizardmen and the Old Ones

Long before the first man stood upright, before the elves raised their white towers or the dwarfs delved their first hold, the world already had its keepers. In the vast jungle continent of Lustria, across the western ocean, dwell the Lizardmen — cold-blooded, ancient, and utterly alien to the younger races. They do not raid for plunder or conquer for glory. They wage their wars, raise their step-pyramids, and order their whole existence in service to a purpose older than history itself: the will of the Old Ones, and the vast unfinished design the younger peoples know only as the Great Plan.

The Old Ones

The Old Ones were god-beings of the deep past — enigmatic powers who came to the world when it was young and remade it to their liking. They shaped its continents, tilted it upon its axis, and quickened the first life upon it, seeding the world with creatures who would one day become elves, dwarfs, and men. To reach the world they built great gateways at the northern and southern poles, portals of impossible artifice through which they crossed the void. And to carry out their designs while they laboured elsewhere, they made servants: first and greatest among them the amphibian sages who would remember their commands long after the Old Ones themselves had vanished from the world.

The Great Plan

Everything the lizardmen do proceeds from the Great Plan — the cosmic order the Old Ones intended to impose upon the world. Its full shape is known to no living creature, recorded only in fragments upon sacred glyph-plaques and in the fathomless memories of the mage-priests. The lizardmen enact it with absolute, unwavering devotion, ordering the very geography of the world and the fates of nations toward ends that mortals cannot grasp. To the younger races this makes the lizardmen baffling and often terrifying: they will march to war over a single ancient carving, raze a colony that violates some forgotten decree, and ignore a great treasure that means nothing to the Plan. They are not cruel, exactly. They are simply following orders older than the stars.

The Slann Mage-Priests

The masterminds of the lizardmen are the Slann Mage-Priests — immense, toad-like sorcerers of staggering psychic power, the first and most perfect of the Old Ones' creations. A Slann may sit in unbroken meditation for a thousand years, communing with the fading echoes of its makers and bending the winds of magic to reshape battlefields, summon storms, or level cities with a gesture. They remember the words the Old Ones spoke at the dawn of the world, and they labour ceaselessly to set right a design that has drifted catastrophically off course. The greatest of them are legends even among their own kind — such as the venerable Lord Mazdamundi, and Lord Kroak, first and mightiest of all the Slann, who serves the Plan still though he was slain long ages ago.

The Spawnings of Lustria

Beneath the mage-priests toil the lesser lizardmen, each breed hatched from the sacred spawning-pools for its appointed role. The saurus are cold-blooded warriors, born knowing only duty and battle, who form the disciplined core of every lizardmen army. The smaller, quicker skinks are the cunning ones — scouts, skirmishers, and the priests who tend the temples and read the will of the heavens. The massive kroxigor labour to raise the great pyramids and wade into battle wielding stone-crushing weapons. Each creature emerges from the pools already suited to its purpose, an expression of the Plan made flesh, without ambition or individuality as the younger races would understand it. A lizardmen host is less an army than a single vast organism enacting an ancient command.

The Temple-Cities

Across Lustria rise the temple-cities — colossal complexes of step-pyramids and processional causeways, some still gleaming, many swallowed by the encroaching jungle. Itza, the First City, is the oldest and most sacred, raised where the Old Ones first set foot upon the world; others such as Hexoatl and Tlaxtlan guard their own sacred sites and star-aligned observatories. These cities are storehouses of gold and cold antiquity, and their glittering treasures have lured many an expedition of the High Elf Realms, Bretonnian knights, and human adventurers to their deaths in the fever-jungles. The lizardmen do not value the gold. They value the cities, and they defend them with a ferocity that has drowned countless invaders in the green dark.

The War That Never Ends

The defining catastrophe of lizardmen history is the coming of Chaos. When the great polar gates of the Old Ones collapsed — a disaster explored in our account of the Realm of Chaos and the Wastes — raw Chaos flooded into the world through the ruined portals, and the Old Ones themselves vanished, whether slain or fled no one now knows. Into that first, terrible tide the lizardmen threw themselves as the world's first defenders, and Lustria became a battlefield of pure survival. They have never stopped fighting since. To the cold-blooded servants of the Old Ones, the daemon and the marauder are not merely enemies but corruptions of the design they exist to protect, and every incursion described in our study of the forces of Chaos is, to them, another wound in a wound that has never healed.

Keepers of a Broken Design

The tragedy of the lizardmen is that they serve a plan whose architects are gone and whose completion may no longer be possible. They labour on regardless, reading the stars, guarding their crumbling cities, and correcting a world that drifts further from the Old Ones' intent with every passing age. To the men and elves who share the world with them — the very races the Old Ones seeded — they are strange, unknowable, and often hostile, guardians of a truth about the world's origins that the younger peoples have half forgotten. They were here first, from the days recounted in our overview of the Old World, and they intend to keep their vigil until the design is fulfilled or the world itself is ended.