Kevin
03-09-2005, 04:52 PM
In order to celebrate the Revision of Burning Wheel, I'm going to create a full-on setting for serpent people and lizardfolk. This whole thing is based on ideas I had while writing Mindshadows (http://www.greenronin.com/catalog/grr1402), but given the structures of d20 it ended up as mostly flavour text.
So, without repeating any copyrighted material, the core idea was that the serpent people were descendants of snake cultists who had, centuries ago, performed weird and vile rites to merge themselves with snakes.
Some remained mostly human in appearance and can still move within human cultures. A second set are more reptilian in appearance and tend to live in the jungles away from human contact. The most reptilian only have a vague connection to their human beginnings and look like giant snakes or lizards, and not incedentally tend to be the priests of their cult.
The main thing that made them interesting as antagonists was that their motivations fell outside the norm. As partial snakes, they had very little in the way of co-operative pack instincts and so little in the way of social cohesiveness. Worse yet, as they grow in power they become increasingly predatory and non-emapthetic, until eventually they stop believing that the outside world is "real" in any meaningful sense. (Naturally, this is the basis for their emotional magic, which I'm terming "cold-bloodedness").
The only thing that holds them together is the desire to reproduce and breed. They're naturally sterile, you see, and need humans to continue their species. They perform black rites upon pregnant human women in order to turn the babies into serpent people. Naturally, few mothers are willing to go along with this, and so the serpent people have a lot of connections with slavers and raiders.
The snake cult conspiracy deeply penetrates human society, not because the snakes care what we do, but because they know that we would care about what they do. They do everything in their power to cover up evidence of their existence and allow the kidnappings to continue unabated. To them, we are little more than smart, dangerous animals who need to be domesticated.
More over the next couple of weeks. I'll start by burning up some examples (since the MonBu is still good).
So, without repeating any copyrighted material, the core idea was that the serpent people were descendants of snake cultists who had, centuries ago, performed weird and vile rites to merge themselves with snakes.
Some remained mostly human in appearance and can still move within human cultures. A second set are more reptilian in appearance and tend to live in the jungles away from human contact. The most reptilian only have a vague connection to their human beginnings and look like giant snakes or lizards, and not incedentally tend to be the priests of their cult.
The main thing that made them interesting as antagonists was that their motivations fell outside the norm. As partial snakes, they had very little in the way of co-operative pack instincts and so little in the way of social cohesiveness. Worse yet, as they grow in power they become increasingly predatory and non-emapthetic, until eventually they stop believing that the outside world is "real" in any meaningful sense. (Naturally, this is the basis for their emotional magic, which I'm terming "cold-bloodedness").
The only thing that holds them together is the desire to reproduce and breed. They're naturally sterile, you see, and need humans to continue their species. They perform black rites upon pregnant human women in order to turn the babies into serpent people. Naturally, few mothers are willing to go along with this, and so the serpent people have a lot of connections with slavers and raiders.
The snake cult conspiracy deeply penetrates human society, not because the snakes care what we do, but because they know that we would care about what they do. They do everything in their power to cover up evidence of their existence and allow the kidnappings to continue unabated. To them, we are little more than smart, dangerous animals who need to be domesticated.
More over the next couple of weeks. I'll start by burning up some examples (since the MonBu is still good).