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Discussion The "City" in Temple Cities

Discussion in 'Fluff and Stories' started by Scalenex, Nov 30, 2017.

  1. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    Lizardmen Temple City Planning

    I never liked the GW diagrams of Lizardmen Temple Cities, they seemed more like child art projects then logical layouts. So my plan is to make a temple city layout that makes sense.

    This is a counterpart to this piece on temple cities. This piece is covering temple cities.

    I might slip up here and there and use cities to refer to any place Lizardmen live, but they don’t all live in cities. Lizardmen probably live in one of these places.

    Major Metropolises: These are huge cities with at least a hundred thousand Skinks, tens of thousands of Sauri and dozens of Slann if not hundreds of them. This basically includes the Big Four Itza, Hexoatl, Tlaxtlan, and Xlanhuapec. I like to call them the Big Four. Zlatan qualifies too if you haven’t written off the Southlands. These locations were set along ley lines by the will of the Great Plan and have been standing for centuries.

    Reclaimed Ruins: These used to have tens of thousand of inhabitants, and they may or may not still be large in terms of space they take up. The probably have lots of buildings at least partially standing, but they have a relatively small population of Skinks and other First occupying them. They probably have very few Slann or none at all. Like the Big Four, these locations were set along ley lines by the will of the Great Plan. In the past they just were either wrecked by invaders or abandoned or both. The new occupants may want to operate the ley lines to serve the original city’s role in the Great Plan, but the new occupants are probably mainly there to protect the spawning pools and remaining vaults.

    Kahoun: These are intact Temple Cities that are well kept and fully occupied, they are just much smaller. In fact they are not on any GW maps. The plurality of Lustria-Online members who create their own fluff cities choose one of these even if not everyone likes the term Kahoun for small temple city. These locations were probably set along ley lines by the will of the Great Plan, but they might actually not have been created in the halcyon days when the First Generation Slann lived and they may or may not be located along major ley lines. These are all created by players so they can be wherever you want and as big or small as the creators want, but most L-O forumites seem to prefer small cities.

    Settlements: These sites are probably not holy. These sites are occupied because they meet the Lizardmen’s short term goals. For a Lizardmen “short term goals” could mean “five hundred years”. These could be fortifications guarding sites that are strategically important, but are not particularly sacred. They could be advance way stations for deep jungle scouts. Primitive as they are, the Lizardmen still need resources. They could have mining camps or stone quarries. Lizardmen collect rare fauna too, but they would probably not stay in one place long enough to build a settlement when they do this.

    Let’s cover the very basics.


    Lizardmen need water

    Like most living creatures, Skinks, Sauri and presumably even Slann need some moisture to survive. They probably require more drinking water than mammals of the same size would require. It’s probably good for their skin condition to have a good soak or swim once in a while. Even ancient and medieval industry needs some water. Also water is good for fighting fires.


    The Skinks who handle a city’s basic needs cannot ignore this but relative to the other challenges, this is pretty easy. Lustria has pretty abundant rivers, streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes. Lustria has caves, and caves are formed by water. Therefore, deductive reasoning states that Lustria has some water underground. Lizardmen are capable of using underground water through naturally occurring springs or by digging wells. It rains a lot in Lustria and Skinks can certainly put out rain barrels or other containers to improve their water supply. They could either just stick out barrels when it starts raining, or they could use gutters and aqueducts to funnel water from a wide area (especially roofs) towards a collection area.


    Lizardmen are surely well-versed enough in avoiding dangerous flora and fauna they can safely harvest water from any pond, lake, or river (except spawning pools of course, that would be taboo). The real difficulty with using most surface water is microbes.

    Skinks and Saurus can maybe handle germs and micro-parasites in naturally occurring fresh water better than real world humans can, but if they cannot, their technology level is sufficient to use the ancient era water purification solution used by almost every civilization on earth to purify their water supplies: make it into something alcoholic.

    Fun fact, if you compare notes on the Marco Colombo biography in the 5th edition Dogs of War book and Marco’s epic in the 5th Edition Lizardmen book establishes one can draw the conclusion that 1) Sknks can make fermented drinks that are quite tasty and 2) It was quite intoxicating to Humans, but potent as orange juice to Skinks. I don’t know if Toughness 2 creatures would have superhuman alcohol tolerance, but whether they can hold their liquor or not, the Skinks can certainly use the fermentation process to make water safe to drink. If anything, superhuman alcohol tolerance makes them more likely to use fermentation, not less.


    Then again, the Lizardmen have some wisdom of the Old Ones beyond the ken of the lesser races. They could have the post-medieval scientific knowledge. Boiling water is a very simple cure-all for pretty much all water contaminants. Yes, it won’t get out mud from your water, but it will sanitize the dirt particles at least. Skinks are industrious enough that they could probably manufacture some sort of a filtration system too, but I’m not sure that’s necessary.


    Lizardmen settlements outside the jungle have to work even harder for drinkable water. This includes deserts, the Culchan plains, small islands out to sea and any temporary settlement used as an advanced base for expeditions into the so-called Old World. I’m guessing any Lizardmen settlement outside of the jungle has to prioritize obtaining water above most, if not all, other concerns.


    Major Metropolises: There is a lot of water available but because of the large population, every possible method needs to be used. In addition to naturally occurring water sources, they would probably want aqueducts, wells, rain barrels. Every trick I mentioned.

    Reclaimed Ruins: Water is easy. Unless the ruined city had the water irreparably tainted by Skaven or Daemons for all time, there are probably enough natural bodies of water nearby to handle the small population. Some of the original infrastructure that was built during the city’s heyday to meet their water needs may still be intact, or at least intact enough to be repaired fairly quickly.

    Kahoun: You can have the same infrastructure in place for water that the big cities have, but with a smaller population, Kahoun can rely on natural water bodies and keep their populations' watered with a lot less effort.

    Settlements: The nice thing about settlements is the Lizardmen can place them almost anywhere they want. They probably can place them almost anywhere they want because they don’t have ley lines or Golden Plaques dictating what goes where. Even if the Lizardmen are building a settlement outside of the rainforest, I’m betting they will choose to build their settlement near an abundant water source like a natural spring or oasis, just so they have less work to do.


    Lizardmen need food

    The jungle is teeming with life. A lot of it is dangerous, but the Skinks and Saurus should be well trained in avoiding the dangers and finding food, or at least a large portion of them should have this training. A small population can probably sustain itself with a modest portion of their population hunting and foraging in the surrounding jungle.

    The Big Four cannot do this, at least not enough to feed everyone. They have too many people living in a small space. If they had to gather all of their food from the surrounding jungle, they would end up exhausting the land, possibly irreparably.


    Based on official fluff sources, Temple Guard and Eternity Wardens can go a long time standing still without food or water. I’m going to assume the Slann toss a little bit of passive magic to their guards to let them magically fight off hunger. Maybe some of the lesser Slann extend cantrips over their major cities to make their minions require less food. Another option is Life magic could speed the growth of edible plants and animals used as food sources. It’s dangerous to not have a non-magical backup means of acquiring food. Magical disruptions are already dangerous, you don’t want to add a famine on top of that whatever the normal miscast effects are.

    Let us assume we cannot fix the food problems with “a wizard did it.” That means the major Lizardmen population centers will have to dedicate a large workforce towards the production of food, just like the filthy warmbloods do.


    Just for the note, when I talk about a food supply, I’m not going to deal with feeding the Slann. It’s just not worth getting into the nuts and bolts of their care and feeding. Even if feeding them is very complex and labor intensive, there are plenty of Skinks that will literally work themselves to death to do it if necessary.


    Lizardmen probably require less food than mammals of the same size and activity level on account of being cold blooded. This simplifies things. Sauri and Kroxigor are evolved from predators. So are Slann technically. If another person wants to establish Sauri and Kroxigor (or Skinks and Slann) as obligate carnivores in their fluff, that’s perfectly understandable, but I prefer to have most Lizardmen be omnivores. Omnivores survive better and all the other Forces of Order are omnivores, I believe the Old Ones would want the Lizardmen to be omnivores as well.

    They might be omnivores but they probably need some meat to stay healthy. This complicates things. Skinks may or may not be able to survive on a mostly vegetarian diet, but Skinks are probably okay eating grubs, insects and stuff most humans aren’t super eager to eat, so they can get their protein that way. Maybe Saurus and Kroxigor are also okay with eating bugs too. If Lizardmen are obligate carnivores they would still want to consider farming, if only as a means to feed livestock.

    Crops

    Potatoes may be staples of northern European cousine, but the modern potatoes’ ancestors came from South America. The Lizardmen probably cultivate potato fields in or near their cities. Lizardmen probably do not rely on starchy foods the way humans do, but I figure potatoes would be their biggest crop.

    Lizardmen are based very loosely on real world Native Americans, especially the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans. If I remember anything from my one elective anthropology class, corn, beans, and squash was considered a nutrient triangle for a lot of civilized Native American tribes. This is considerably north of the Amazon rainforest, but so what? The Aztecs were pretty far north of that too and that didn’t stop the GW writers from using them as a basis for Lizardmen icons and weapon styles. I’m not a huge fan of this because I happen to drive by a cornfield every day on the way to work. I view corn as mundane and Lizardmen as high fantasy. Therefore I struggle to picture a Skink husking corn, but I should get over this particularly hang up. Corn is popular to feed to livestock, so a carnivorous Lizardmen population would probably like a stockpile of corn, so their food can eat.

    Assuming Lizardmen do have access to these traditional Native American crops, I figure they would be more common in the regions on the edge of the jungle. You can have terraced farms in the hills and mountains like the Incans. I imagine agriculture might be a more attractive in the Culchan plains, if only because there is less wild food to scavenge.

    Just because in the real world, Eurasia got a lot more native cereal plants than the Americas doesn’t mean Lustria cannot have the full access to cereal crops. Lustria could have wheat, barley, and rice amongst others. I imagine Lizardmen would do well to cultivate rice if they had access to rice. Lustria has a warm climate and a lot of wet areas that flood at regular intervals. That is ideal for rice cultivation.

    Is picturing a Skink in a wheat field or rice paddy not for you? The jungle is full of naturally occurring fruits, nuts, berries, and roots. The Skinks could easily have gardens and orchards that are carefully tended. Most illustrations of Temple Cities have a lot of trees in them. If you are going to have trees in your Temple City, you may as well have trees that produce foodstuffs.

    I really like the idea of rooftop gardens. For one thing it would look awesome in an illustration or as a modeling project. Since most non-pyramid buildings are drawn with flat roofs, this would be an efficient use of space in the city. Raised gardens would also provide a modicum of protection against pests, at least pests without wings. As an added bonus, rooftop gardens would absorb heavy rains and reduce flooding in the city. The only challenge is to make sure the ceilings are strong enough to handle all the significant additional weight.

    Lizardmen can making gathering food in the wilderness easier with passively managed crops. For example, let say you are a Skink collecting some firewood near his city. The Skink is not going to chop down a fruit or nut bearing tree if he can help it. And if the Kroxigor do clear cut a section of jungle, you can let the jungle naturally reclaim the cleared, or Skinks could strategically plant banana trees there instead. Over time, the jungle outskirts of Temple Cities with active population are probably going to have a higher portion of nutrient plants than a random patch of empty jungle. It’s probably going to have fewer animals (hunting near the city would reduce populations), but the same animals a hunter can catch and eat are also the same animals likely to poach your passively managed crops, so scarce animal life around a city could have an upside.

    Animals

    Hunting and trapping is almost too obvious to mention. Big or small, warm blood or cold blood, I’m guessing the First Children of the Old Ones know how to find, kill, and prepare for consumption every single non-poisonous animal in Lustria. They probably have antidotes or gland removal tactics to let them safely eat half of Lustria’s poisonous animals if pressed. But large population centers have to be careful not to over deplete their local game.

    The same lakes, ponds, streams, and springs that can provide fresh water can also hold fish, amphibians, reptiles, and insects that the Lizardmen can eat. The Skinks can actively manage hatcheries for essentially domesticated food or they can passively manage their seafood by making minor efforts to screen out unwanted fauna.

    Jungle climates create a lot of dark dank places, good for growing fungus or attracting edible insects. It would pretty easy to dig a big hole and call it a fungus farm or grub ranch. As an added bonus, this can help with waste management.

    We have some good fluff pieces exploring Lizardmen as llama herders. Llamas were the major real world domesticated megafauna of South America. It makes sense that Lizardmen would raise them for meat. They could probably use the wool too. Just like the fluff pieces that feature them, they would probably be roving herds not kept in the Temple Cities. Another domesticated New World livestock that was historically used was guinea pigs. Not exactly a lot of meat, but they would be easy to raise in confined spaces and unlike llamas, could be easily kept inside cities. I do not know if any of the First Children of the Old Ones would have a sweet tooth, but I believe honeybees would thrive in Lustria with relatively little effort. Also bees pollinate crops, so they would increase crop yields.

    There are enough human settlements in Lustria now, that Skinks who are willing to think outside the box could steal some Old World livestock and breed them. I do not believe Lizardmen would be willing or able to consume dairy products, so I’m not sure they would want to keep cattle or goats. I mean, they’d eat them if they came across cows or goats, but I don’t think they’d go through the trouble to raise their own.

    The most coveted livestock the warmbloods possess would be chickens. They are easy to keep in combined spaces and I believe the First probably would have no taboos about eating eggs. They could even have their own native Lustrian beasts kept for their eggs. I don’t think most Skinks would mind raising pigs either. They are relatively easy to keep and feed, though they do produce a lot of waste relative to other commonly domesticated animals

    Medicine and poisons

    Most medicines, spices, herbs, poisons, antidotes or drugs in Lustria come from plants or animals. That means they are either going to have hunt and gather it, or cultivate it in their cities. All the same things I said about food, apply to these things too. Most things are specialized enough that even a large city can probably get by with one herb garden for each category. But if you have a city whose denizens regularly march into cold places, they are going to need to cultivate a lot of Xiliqua plants. Xiliqua root can be turned into gum that lets a Skink, Saurus, or Kroxigor artificially warm their bodies. Given the specialized nature of medicines, spices, herbs, and the like, I think these would be ideal crops to grow on rooftop gardens.

    Storing Food

    No one in the Warhammer world has access to refrigeration or canning technology. Lizardmen have the added disadvantage of living in a hot humid jungle full of large and tiny animals who want to steal your food. Storing food is hard in Lustria. Since Lustria doesn’t really have a winter in the sense the Old World does, A small settlement with a lot of foragers can enjoy a relatively constant stream of fresh food, but the vagaries of life are such that you will have periods of plenty and periods of deprivation, so cities, especially large ones, will need some method of long-term food storage. How do Lizardmen do it?

    One ancient and medieval standby for preserving food, especially meat, was packing it in salt. Smoking and drying helps but these things are easier with salt. Lizardmen would probably use this if they can get it. To get salt, you need to mine it (very hard work), or fill big vats with sea water and let it evaporate (very slow) or boil sea water till the salt is left over (moderately slow, moderate hard work). Given the relative lack of Lizardmen coastal settlements, salt mining is probably the norm.

    Skinks and Kroxigors are not afraid of hard work, but I imagine given how much fresh water they need, Skinks and Kroxigor would be more vulnerable to the hazards of salt mining than real world pre-industrial humans. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t do it, it just means it’s probably on the top of most Skinks' lists for least desirable jobs.

    Apart from salt, there are also natural grown spices that can serve as preservatives. In the real world a lot of the world’s spiciest peppers come from South and Central America. Spices can preserve food in their own right. Also spices can repel pests to some extant. In the twenty-first century, if you look at the cultures that tend to favor spicy food, a pattern emerges. If you look at the real world places with cultures that tend to favor spicy food, they are frequently places with warm and wet climates. Have you sold you on Lizardmen liking spicy food? Good, Moving on then.

    One thing that sci-fi and fantasy settings drop the ball on is have their denizens create an invention, construction technique, or magical application and only use it for one thing. Here’s a thought. If the Lizardmen can create airtight, watertight, vermin-proof temple chambers to protect sacred artifacts, they could use these same buildings techniques to create airtight, watertight, vermin proof chambers in their civilian buildings and store their llama meat. Most food is more delicate than golden plaques, but food will last longer in these “food vaults” than out of them. I like that term. I’m going to try to work that colloquialism into a fluff piece. “Go into the 'sacred vault' and get the llama meat. I’m hungry.”

    There is official and unofficial fluff showing that Lizardmen can make alcoholic beverages. It’s debatable whether Skinks and Saurus have amazing or average alcohol tolerance, but either way, starchy or sugary foods can be fermented. Especially if Lizardmen have exceptional alcohol tolerance, they can use fermentation to make their crops and gathered plants store longer. Brewing and pickling are not exactly the same process, but they are close enough that if Skinks can figure out one, they can probably figure out the other. This is another low tech way to preserve food. To use these food preservation methods, you need air tight sealed containers. In the real world, air tight pottery seals goes back to ancient times. If you got a container that is not truly air tight, Skinks could seal the gaps with wax.


    Major Metropolises: A major metropolis will have to work very hard to feed their population. They are going to need to hunt and gather in the surrounding area but be very careful not to hunt or gather or anything to local extinction. They are going to want to cultivate crops. They probably want to keep some llama herds nearby. They are going to have to utilize every potential source of food they can find, and may have to impose strict rationing on the population or supplement food production with magic. They might be able to import food from allies though that assumes a top of the line transportation method because you travel with extra food long enough and your delivery team will end up eating it all, unless the roads are magic in which case importing food would be relatively easy.
    Reclaimed Ruins: They would need to rely on hunting and gathering in the surrounding area. The good news is defending the ruins is probably the main reason they are resettling the ruins. The same patrols looking for invaders could also be looking for food. A relatively intact ruined city could have their food producing infrastructure repaired and reused.

    Kahoun: Food is easy. Their populations are small enough that they can meet most of their food needs by hunting and foraging in the surrounding jungle, but they are organized enough that they can still take advantage of the agricultural and animal husbandry options that the Big Four use. If the Big Four import food from far away, they probably import it from various Kahoun.

    Settlements: A military encampment can meet their food needs by having their regular patrols incorporating hunting and gathering into their routines. A civilian settlement like a mining camp is going to either have to have extra workers whose sole purpose is to find food, or they are going to have to get regular caravans of supplies from an allied Temple City or Kahoun.


    Lizardmen need some sort of sanitation

    Maybe the Slann have evolved beyond those base needs, but I don’t think Skinks and Sauri are so sci-fi that their bodies don’t make waste products. They may urinate and defecate less than humans or more than humans, but they surely produce waste products. A jungle patrol can probably take care of these base needs in the jungle while on the move, but you get a large population of creatures in one place, waste will build up. There is also animal waste too. In addition to Skinks and Sauri, Cold Ones, Stegadons, Carnosaurs, llamas and everything else also need to poop.

    Before the introduction of sewer systems, real world human cities had a painfully high rate of disease because human waste products were often just randomly dumped in the street or even into the water supply. I believe Lizardmen taboos would make them careful about dumping waste products into their water supply, or at a bare minimum not putting all of their waste into the water supply.

    I believe Skinks have the technology understanding to create running water similar to the Ancient Romans had with their aqueducts, but I don’t think they would use this to flush sewage away given water taboos. Skinks would not want to use running water to flush away their fecal waste. That’s an insult to the Old Ones and the Spawning pools that birthed them.

    There are lot of gross yucky things in the jungle, so Skinks and Sauri can probably tolerate less sanitary conditions than real world humans can handle. Due to the wealth of insects and microbes in a tropical setting, a pile of feces will disappear faster in a tropical jungle than in a typical urban area. Maybe the Lizardmen could follow the historical real world strategy of dumping ones waste out in the street, but given that Lizardmen are often more densely packed in their settlements than humans are, this would probably not be feasible. Alternatively, they could have outhouses, waste holes, or other designated places Skinks and Sauri go to poop.

    Even if the First Children of the Old Ones don’t dump their waste in the streets, it’s a good bet their livestock, beasts of burden and war beasts probably aren’t using latrines or chamber pots. Lizardmen are generally portrayed as being okay working menial…crappy jobs. Skinks can gather up waste products and haul them away. Maybe they scoop it out of the streets, maybe they scoop out the outhouses, waste holes, and designated pooping places. They could either dump it out in the jungle, or they could use it to fertilize the gardens, fungus farms, and insect hatcheries.

    I’m going to add that sanitation is not just about fecal matter. The Lizardmen would probably produce garbage, though it would be mostly leftovers from food such as bones, clamshells, or cornhusks. They would also produce ashes from fires and other remnants of their primitive industry. These things still a sanitation problem. Since most of their trash would be biodegradable, Lizardmen can probably dump their garbage in the same place and matter as fecal waste. It could contribute to compost to aid with food production just like fecal waste. Non-biodegradable waste, what little there is, can be buried or dumped out to sea.


    Major Metropolises: Sanitation is very difficult. They are probably going to require a large workforce to haul their waste products away. It might actually be the most common job held by Skinks, or at least the second most common job behind food production. But Lizardmen proudly attend their duty, even when their duty sometimes stinks.

    Reclaimed Ruins: They probably don’t have enough of a labor force to haul their waste far away, though any Skink or Saurus near the outskirts could take a short walk in the jungle to do their business. When that is not feasible, the expedient option would be to pick an abandoned building or abandoned plaza with no religious significance, far away from drinking water sources and declare that the “dropping” zone. This can make things awkward later if the city is every completely reclaimed, but you can always re-purpose the area into a fungus farm or insect hatchery later.

    Kahoun: A Kahoun would have a similar system to the Big Four. They are generally not as densely populated and they generally have a shorter walk to get to the jungle outside, so cleanup crews would have a slightly easier time. Same basic concept though.

    Settlements: Sanitation for Settlements is easy. They probably don’t need any sanitation workers. Their encampments are probably small enough that every Skink, Saurus, or Kroxigor can simply walk a hundred yards outside of camp and go in the woods and then walk back.


    Lizardmen need to build some fires

    I’m sure we can have a good natured debate on whether Lizardmen like their meat raw or cooked. Even in a tropical setting, sometimes a Skink is probably going to want to sometimes use a fire for warmth. I have not seen any official sources saying Lizardmen can see in the dark, and before Thomas Edison, fire was how we see at night. Lizardmen would certainly have torches. They would probably have candles, lanterns, and braziers too. Fires and smoke work as a low tech means of non-magical means of long range communication too.

    Most fluff pieces do not give Lizardmen the ability to make things like hardened steel, but they do have metalworking. Especially bronze and gold. This requires forges, and forges require fires. Other industries require fires too. Skinks would need to use fires boil leather, heat up saunas, prepare hot water for cleaning, incinerate waste, harden pottery in kilns, among many other practical uses for fire.

    If fires are commonplace and a major aspect of society, they might even have central communal fires kept going around the clock, much like the Ancient Greeks/Romans had temples to Hestia/Vesta with a communal fire going twenty-four hours a day, so that families can go to if their communal hearth is extinguished. In this case, these eternally maintained fires would probably be Chotec shrines.

    In the jungle, fuel is plentiful. A huge dense jungle. Real world jungles can reclaim cleared land relatively quickly if the area isn’t stripped to the metaphorical bone. It’s not a stretch to say that Lustria is more jungle-y than real world jungles, so barring deliberate attempts to poison the land, cleared jungle probably recovers astonishingly fast. Gathering firewood is not hard for a city in the jungle. You get a settlement outside the jungle, not a huge deal. Your firewood collectors just have to walk a bit farther.

    Any urban area needs to worry about accidental fires. Despite how moist a rainforest can be, they can still burn (otherwise slash and burn farming wouldn't be a thing). Skinks are smart and organized. They can probably organize fairly efficient bucket brigades. Against a raging forest fire, about the only thing they can do without using the Lore of Heavens to summon rain and ice, is to get ahead of the fire and Kroxigor clear and level a buffer zone and put up a mounds of flame retardant dirt.

    One thing that will help an accidental fire not get too bad is that most Lizardmen structures in temple cities are made out of stone. The jungle humidity can rot wood pretty fast, so wood would be an unpopular building material even without the risk of fires. More than that, Lizardmen tend to take the long term view of things and build stone structures with the idea of using them for many generations, even if it’s not a temple or other sacred structure. They still probably want to drill Skinks and Kroxigor in some kind of fire brigade with buckets or the equivalent because there is plenty of foliage in and around a city to cause damage.


    Major Metropolises: Given that the Lizardmen rely on the jungles of Lustria as a barrier to invaders, they probably don’t want to deforest the areas around their cities, so they probably have to harvest trees selectively or rely on gathering dead wood. This means firewood gatherers may have to haul the wood pretty far. Given that the Big Four have huge population of organized Skinks, they could probably squash accidental fires pretty quick by funneling workers to the troubled area and giving them buckets. They could even avoid natural forest fires. They probably cannot put giant forest fires out completely, but their hundreds of Terradon riders can probably spot natural fires well in advance so the Skinks and Kroxigor can clear cut the jungle around the city and put up earth mounds to prevent the fires from spreading too far.

    Reclaimed Ruins: Collecting firewood is pretty easy since they should have plenty of surrounding jungle to gather fuel for their small population. Even better, if you have to clear out the overgrowth from an area you are reclaiming, you might as well burn the cleared overgrowth for fuel when you are done. These cities are not likely to have a large organized fire fighting force, but they are probably going to primarily dwell around a water source and not have much industry, so accidental fires would be rare.

    There is not much they can do about natural forest fires, but given that the city is already in ruins, if something could have burned down, it probably already has, so the damage to the structures would be low. The inhabitants can focus on saving themselves and not worry about saving the buildings. I imagine they would exercise their aquatic abilities and safely wait out any major fires sheltering in the biggest body of water in the city.

    Kahoun: Collecting firewood is easier than for the Big Four, a little bit more laborious than reclaimed ruins. They are more vulnerable to accidental fires than the other settlements because they have a full industry of worker Skinks building fires, but they don’t have a lot of spare workers to draft into a fire brigade during emergencies. They are probably especially vulnerable to forest fires, and may be the most likely Lizardmen city type to employ magical firefighting techniques.

    Settlements: The structures are probably wooden, but they are probably pretty simple. I’m guessing they would not bother trying to put out most of their flaming buildings after a certain point. Get the people out, then rebuild later. Forest fires are a huge danger, but accidental fires are probably rare. Yes, they probably have campfires near wooden structures, but these fires would probably have someone attending them around the clock, so they can avoid large accidental fires before they get out of control with one barrel of water. On the plus side, gathering firewood is probably very easy.



    You said Lizardmen need Water?

    Skinks and Kroxigor are Aquatic with a capital “A.” Slann and Sauri are probably aquatic with a small “a.” Lizardmen can probably stand in the rain a lot longer than humans can before they suffer ill effects, but they aren’t fish, they can still drown.

    Overlooking the risk of a Skink being swept up in a fast current and eventually drowning, the biggest drowning concern for the First Children of the Old Ones is mudslides. Muddy water would harder to swim against. Even if a Lizardmen is one of the rare spawnings with partially functioning gills, drowning in muddy water would be a horrible way to die.

    Water does more than create a drowning hazard. Look at a picture of the Grand Canyon. This is was basically formed by water damage. Water can knock down structures, rot foundations, ruin crops, obliterate delicate items, and rust most metal. A flood can even threaten drinking water if it carries contaminants into a clean source of water.

    Most illustrations of Lizardmen Temple Cities have flat roofs. It rains a lot in Lustria. Roofs should at least be slightly tilted so rain water doesn’t pool on them and collapse the roof, though I suppose a reinforced stone roof can handle the weight of a water pooling on the roof. Water will eventually flow off a perfectly flat elevated surface. Better still, work in good drainage system with aqueducts, pipes or gutters can help with the collection of rain water for drinking. Yay, solve two problems at once.

    Making a rain-proof roof is not particular hard. Flooding is a bigger concern. A realistic Temple City should have canals, ditches, levees, and similar things to redirect excess water. I’m not sure if Mesoamerican technology with a dash of magic can create storm sewers, but it’s an idea worth pursuing. With all the aforementioned pools, streams, springs, rivers, lakes and whatnot likely to be around a city, flash floods are going to be an issue. Ideally, one would want to funnel water towards drinking supplies or irrigation for crops.

    If cropland or gardens lie in the boundaries of a Temple City, it would probably be best to cultivate plants that require large amounts of water. If the plants inside a city suck up a lot of water, that’s rain water that is not flooding the city. Temples and other important buildings will need to have water tight foundations. I imagine wood structures will need to be elevated. That’s why my WIP Skink huts are on stilts.


    Major Metropolises: The Big Four would want a lot of artificial constructions to redirect and keep out flood water. Fortunately they have a huge labor force to build and maintain this with.

    Reclaimed Ruins: Denizens of a reclaimed ruin can probably do very little to defend themselves against flooding. They probably don’t have a big workforce or a lot of time to rebuild or replace anti-flood constructions. On the plus side, the city probably flooded before hundreds of times already so the new inhabitants can look at the ruins for signs of past water damage to figure out where flood waters tend to end and resettle in the areas of the city relatively safe from flood damage. If they need to build new shelters, they would probably rely on the same wooden structures settlements use: wooden huts on stilts, and they can look over past signs of flood damage to figure out the safest places to build huts.

    Kahoun: Basically they need to rely on artificial levees, aqueducts, gutters, and drainage ditches much like the Big Four, but they don’t have quite the labor force the Big Four do, so they are a little bit more vulnerable. Also, their temples and most important structures were probably not created in the time of the Old Ones so they might not have as solid of foundations. They might have to draft a bunch of Skinks to scoop out flooded basements sometimes, at least in their civilian buildings.

    Settlements: Huts on stilts are what the Skinks would probably build to sleep in or store perishable supplies in. If a flood destroys everything. Well, I guess it's time to rebuild.



    Lizardmen need to protect themselves against animals.

    A hut or even adobe cannot keep a Carnosaur out if the Carnosaur really wants in, but why would a Carnosaur attack a Temple City or even a ramshackle cluster of wooden buildings? As fearsome as they are, Carnosaurs are predators. Predators seek out weak vulnerable prey with lots of meat. Even a flimsy shelter is more resistance than a Carnosaur is used to dealing with. A Kroxigor might be a tempting snack, but a Saurus, or especially a Skink is not a very appealing source of food, not enough meat. Would you want to eat popcorn one kernel at a time, especially if the kernels ran away from you very fast?

    Also, let’s assume if a hungry Carnosaur is sniffing around a city for food, and twenty Skinks pop up throwing javelins the Carnosaur will probably back away. Yes, a Carnosaur can defeat a bunch of Skinks throwing sharp sticks, but this is more resistance than the Carnosaur hoped to deal with that day. They might run away, or more accurately stated, choose to withdraw.

    There is no rule that says an herbivore cannot be a threat. Remember that every herbivore in Lustria has evolved some sort of natural defenses against Lustria’s predators. They will still lash out and attack things around them if they feel threatened. Stampedes are dangerous and destructive. Imagine the damage a herd of Stegadons can do while stampeding!

    It’s not the big animals that are a threat. There are little critters that can bite. Another reason I think Skinks would put their huts on stilts is to keep creepy crawlies from biting them in their sleep. If you have a lot of big stone buildings and have a choice, very few will volunteer to sleep on the ground floor. Vermin can do more than nibble on sleeping Skinks. They can damage buildings and spread disease. They also are likely to try to help themselves to any food storage areas. Barring the obvious possibility of Skaven meddling, even a regular rat can easily destroy a human sized portion of food by eating some food and then leaving fecal waste to contaminate a lot more.

    You may have to have a troop of Skinks on pest control to exterminate nuisance critters. I imagine the Lizardmen could tame or even domesticate small predators that are good at hunting small pests. Cats come to mind. Animals don’t have to be domesticated or even tamed. If a small predator animal is harmless to Skinks and larger sized creatures, they could just subtly encourage wild animals to hang around their food storage or living areas. Like the common house gecko which is sometimes encouraged to hang around human homes because they eat bugs.


    Then there are animals that Lizardmen choose to keep in their cities, and nearly all of them are dangerous. Cold Ones get ornery if they smell blood, so they need secure pens far away from other creatures or meat storage areas. Their Saurus riders need to be close at hand to restrain them. A Saurus leader should definitely stay with his Carnosaur as much as possible, but I’m guessing that Carnosaurs are the type of predatory to get lethargic and sleepy if well fed, so a trained Carnosaur would be a relatively low hazard resource if it’s kept well fed. Still, a wild Carnosaur would probably not bother trying to eat a Skink. A tamed Carnosaur was specifically trained to target man-sized targets, so if one of these go rogue, it would be catastrophic. Kroxigor have a lot of tasty meat on them would probably carry their weapons and travel in large packs whenever their normal duties take them even remotely close to a Carnosaur pen.


    Razordons shoot quills in all directions if spooked, they need to be penned up in the quietest areas of the cities. Salamanders are a fire hazard. They need to be penned in the wettest area of the city and far away from any wooden structures. With how often they “misfire” in battle I’m sure they kill plenty of Skink handlers during peace time, so any and all precautions need to be taken to minimize this.


    With Terradons it’s probably easier to just not keep them in the city. They are efficient as scouts as messengers if they are on the move anyway, so you don’t need to have more than a fraction of the Terradons in or near the city at any one time. Ripperdactyls are certainly something one would certainly want to keep at a distance most of the time, because I imagine it’d be hard to restrain them from disemboweling the denizens of their cities. The only time you'd want Rippers in your city is when the enemies are literally at your front gates.


    Stegadons and Bastiladons can wreck a lot of buildings or flatten a lot of citizenry, but Stegadons are a major element of the labor force, so they are probably thoroughly conditioned to behave around crowds. Bastiladons are pretty slow and probably aren’t too onery. Also, given that they are only used when toting around holy artifacts, even the Big Four probably don’t have many Bastiladons to worry about. Other tamed or domestic animals can be a handful. Ask anyone who has been around llamas, llamas can be ornery. Real world llamas are tough enough that guard llamas are a real thing.


    Major Metropolises: No large wild animal is going to mess with a major temple city. There is probably a dedicated anti-pest workforce. The biggest difficulty is managing their war beasts and beasts of burden. You got a lot of people (and animals) densely packed into a relatively small area. They would need very careful management and despite this, they probably still have a higher accident rate with their warbeasts and beasts of burden than all of the other settlement types.

    Reclaimed Ruins: The biggest difficulty is that a lot of ruined buildings that would make very appealing lairs to wild animals. Inhabitants have to deal with everything from wasps' nests to Salamander nests. Even if only a small portion of the city is occupied, the inhabitants will probably want to periodically sweep the entire city limits for unwanted animal life. On the plus side, managing tamed and domesticated animals are pretty easy to keep. There is plenty of space to let trained animals claim some personal territory meaning they could maintained with less effort though this can backfire if the extra space and freedom makes their beasts forget their training and decide to go feral.

    Kahoun: Kahoun are probably formidable enough in size to scare off roving predators or large Stegadon herds. A small occupied city would make it fairly easy to keep pests out with a fairly small labor force. For the most part they have the same issues keeping trained beasts as the Big Four, but they have the added advantage that they have easier access to the surrounding jungle to let their beasts exercise in, so they'd have fewer serious accidents with their trained beasts.

    Settlements: Settlements are going to have to deal with large animals wandering in and wandering through. That’s just a fact of life. I think most sleeping quarters would be huts on stilts as a precaution against flooding and smaller creatures invading the sleeping quarters. That’s not going to keep out a Carnosaur, but I don’t think it’s going to attract a Carnosaur either. Clearing out small pests by killing them off would be a never ending battle, but at least you probably toss them in a stew pot at the end of the day. Basically you got campfires and huts on stilts. That’s your only detriment to small invaders. On the plus side, they wouldn’t have many trained animals to worry about and those they have would have a lot of space to exercise and be closely attended at all times just because that’s necessary for the camp’s work.


    Other natural hazards

    After water damage, the main threat to civilization is usually wind. Wind and water often come together. These storms often come with lightning which in addition to doing damage to whatever they hit, lightning can cause fires.

    Okay, so Slann have better things to do than worry about petty disasters, what about Skink Priests? A lot of them have magic spells which can literally control the weather. If things are really out of control a Skink Priest may try to step in magically, but I figure they would do this only as a last resort

    Why a last resort? First off, their basic spell list involves creating storms. Yes, wizards can probably do all sorts of spells that aren’t in the Big Red Book, but it’s probably easier to make a storm worse than it is to make it calmer. Second off, magic has an element of Chaos as possible, no one wants to risk a miscast if they can help it. You can guess if a Skink tried to calm a storm and miscast, the storm would get worse, because magic is Chaos.

    Generally the best Lizardmen can do is hope their buildings are solid enough. They might even have cellars to take shelter in, but they probably don’t unless there is another reason to have a cellar. Given the presence of stone structures and a lot fewer trees with loose branches, Lizardmen are probably safer from high winds and lightning in a city than in the jungle.

    Earthquakes and volcanoes? There is not much you can do. But if you close your eyes does it almost feel like nothing’s changed at all if the Skinks want to be optimists about this. The Skinks better pray to the Old Ones for good luck or hope the Slann are awake and alert to this to pull out some epic defense magic.

    Major Metropolises: No one likes a natural disaster but the Big Four have the biggest strongest structures and can probably take a beating from Mother Nature relatively well.

    Reclaimed Ruins: When the city was abandoned, it was hammered by natural disasters while no one was watching. The settlers can look over the ruins, figure out what which buildings seem to have survived the ravages of time, and hide out from storms in these structures.

    Kahoun: Denizens would hide in the sturdiest stone structures they have and try to wait out the problem.

    Settlements: Run away or hide from the dangers. Rebuild later, possibly somewhere far away.


    Defense against Intruders and Invaders


    Rather than reinvent the wheel. Check out this detailed thread talking about Lizardmen defense.

    Now to apply these principles to the four city categories.


    Major Metropolises: They of course have huge numbers of often redundant patrols plus extensive magical divination, so they are almost never surprised by enemies. They have huge armies and will probably try to stop invaders outside the city limits if they can. If invaders get to the city they will need to face off against well manned city walls, or at least walls around the most sacred sites. Since the Big Four are large and in charge, they can demand help from the other settlements with ease, though if they are benevolent despots, they will lend military assistance more often than they demand it.

    Reclaimed Ruins: Resettled ruins probably have a relatively small number of defenders defending a large area. The Big Four and various Kahoun have a mix of workers and soldiers. In a resettled ruin, nearly every worker by necessity is also trained in combat. If they are lucky enough to have city walls they will use them, but it's unlikely that the walls are still intact or that they have enough men to man the walls. Otherwise they will probably to lay out a bunch of traps throughout the ruin’s outskirts. They will patrol the area as much as they can, and will try to keep communication open with other Lizardmen settlements for reinforcements in emergencies, though they are probably obligated to send some of their troops if their connected allies are themselves attacked.

    Kahoun: They probably want a wall. If the area is high traffic or relies on beasts more than average they might keep their animals outside the walls for simplicity. The area is probably regularly patrolled by Skinks and should have a least a few Terradon riders to do aerial recon. Depending on location, they will probably try to keep in touch with one of the Big Four and other Kahoun for reinforcements if needed.

    Settlements: If it’s a military camp, the entire camp is probably built around the guidelines of a fortress. Maybe a wall, probably a fence. Maybe a ditch or moat. They probably have at least one watch tower or small keep. They probably have some traps in the general area and the area is almost certainly patrolled regularly, so no surprise attacks. Depending on roads, signal fires, or Terradon messengers, they might be able to call on reinforcements from a nearby Temple City or Kahoun if their site is of strategic importance.

    If it’s a work camp, the area might still be patrolled by default just because Skinks probably have to forage for food in the surrounding area, so they probably won’t be caught by surprise. Unless a military threat is very small, their options are probably call for help or abandon camp. The First need various resources but they probably value the lives of Skinks and Kroxigor more than they value a copper mine or stone quarry. In most cases, Lizardmen in a work camp will probably run, not fight.


    Lizardmen need a place to Worship

    Might as well touch base on the religious thread too. Here is how the lessons and discussion of that thread can be applied to the four types of Lizardmen cities.

    Major Metropolises: Given that most Slann and sacred artifacts are kept in major metropolis, temple access is probably highly restricted so most pious Lizardmen that are not themselves priests have to worship elsewhere. They probably have some public areas for low ranking Lizardmen to offer the Old Ones and Sotek their due. These could be amphitheaters, open fields, stadiums, or public non-magical temples. It is probably impossible to have the whole city meet in one place. Major rituals are probably occurring in four or five areas of the city simultaneously. Higher status Lizardmen get to use the prime worship spots.

    Reclaimed Ruins: Lizardmen in reclaimed ruins are probably the busiest so they don’t have as much time for complex rituals. At the same time, anyone willing to take on the risks and burdens of restoring a ruined city probably have great faith in the Old Ones and the Great Plan. That means they probably try to incorporate worship into their daily tasks, perhaps singing spirituals while they work or dedicating their tasks every day to certain Old Ones. When they do have major rituals, they go all out. They work hard, they play hard and they pray hard.

    Kahoun: It’s difficult, but not impossible for a Kahoun to have the entire population meet in a single area for a worship ritual, so they are probably going to try to do this whenever possible. In fact, Kahoun may have the most impressive amphitheaters and coliseums even compared to the Big Four because they are trying to accommodate everyone in one place and the Big Four know that isn't possible. Since they aren’t storing as many sacred artifacts and Slann in Kahoun as the Big Four, lesser Lizardmen can probably access temples easier here than in the major metropolises.

    Settlements: Temples are no really practical but they would assuredly create or carry a small shrine or idol with them. Most religious observances would include literally every Lizardmen present. Their religious observances would probably be informal because they mostly likely have few if any priests among them.


    Lizardmen Need a Place to Sleep

    Saurus might not sleep or they might not sleep in the same manner humans sleep. In official GW publications. Temple Guard can stand vigil for extremely long periods of time. Some Saurus leaders stand motionless for months at a time before called on. Maybe Saurus are hardwired to not sleep. Maybe Slann feed magic into certain Sauri to let them keep watch without sleep.

    My own fluff pieces, I’ve contradicted myself with how Sauri sleep. I’ve had some Sauri stay at attention for really long periods of time, sometimes they sleep at night like normal people. Here’s my retcon. A Saurus can stay at attention waiting for action neither asleep nor awake for really long times, but if a Saurus spends several hours fighting, laboring, marching or otherwise having a full day, he needs to sleep like a normal person to recover, but a Saurus can stay in a state of readiness almost forever if they have even a little bit of food and water. Not canon, but it works.


    Skinks make up the bulk of the population, and they probably sleep in a similar manner to orcs, humans, elves, dwarves, etc. Kroxigor probably sleep too, and they have logistical issue of individually taking up a lot of space. Lizardmen are a communal society used to being surrounded by their spawning brothers and brothers of another mother—err pool. Since Skinks and Kroxigor are literally brothers it makes sense that they would share sleeping space with Skinks. On the other hand, a Temple City planner might decide it’s easier to scale some buildings and their interiors for Skinks and some for Kroxigor.


    Another question about Lizardmen sleeping is do they favor sleeping in one long chunk of time or do they take a lot of naps? If Lizardmen are nap takers than they can get by with fewer sleeping areas as long as everyone doesn’t go to sleep at the same time. I do think most Lizardmen would sleep at the same time, even if it was for naps because I believe Lizardmen would want to sleep when the weather makes moving about uncomfortable. That was generally the impression I got from the fluff pieces in the 5th edition army book, the only official source I’m aware of that covers Lizardmen other than Slann sleeping.


    I do not think most Lizardmen would have any need or desire to sleep in private rooms. That doesn’t mean Lizardmen as a whole wouldn’t mind sleeping alone, they just wouldn’t necessary seek it out. Skink Priests, Skink Chiefs, and Saurus leaders might want a private chamber away from the riff raff, but they might not.


    Being coldblooded, there is no physical need to huddle for warmth, but a huddle lets Skinks, Sauri, and Kroxigor take up less space. In Temple Cities and Kahoun, it would probably be easier to build a small number of large sleeping buildings rather than a large number of small ones. I’m betting most Skinks, Sauri, and Kroxigor would prefer to bunk with their spawning brothers but I’m sure they are communal enough they will share sleeping quarters/spaces with other spawnings if pragmatism bids them to.


    I’m betting most Lizardmen are okay sleeping on hard ground, a stone floor, in a tree, a mud hole, whatever they have if marching through the jungle or out foraging. They can probably sleep okay while being rained on, assuming flood waters don’t carry away their unconscious bodies. That being said, just because they can sleep in these conditions doesn’t mean they want to, especially if they are within the bounds of a Temple City.

    A roof over the head to keep rain and wind out is nice. Walls to keep out unwanted critters is nice too. I don’t think most Lizardmen, barring high ranking leaders would have a bed, but there are a number of things that can make a floor softer. At the lowest level, Skinks and Kroxigor could bunk down in soft mud. For a cleaner option, the floor can be covered with straw. Either piles of straw or woven straw mats. The best sleeping areas (besides beds) would be floors covered with llama wool or fur pelts. Hammocks would be pretty easy to make and appropriate for the climate.

    I imagine most Lizardmen would rather sleep on a warm rock than a cold feather bed. A large sleeping area could have a communal fire (or several communal fires if the room/building is very large and Skinks could take turns tending the fire in the night. Another option is to have some Skinks working the night shift to maintain fires below the sleeping area to heat the floor. High status Lizardmen could have underlings feeding nighttime warming fires. Low status Lizardmen could take turns getting up in the middle of night to tend the fire for an hour or so. Workstations that require round the clock fires (I’m thinking pottery kilns especially) would be an ideal place to put sleeping quarters on the floor above. Waste not want not, this includes heat.


    Besides comfort and safety, there is another consideration for sleeping spaces, and that is convenience. Ideally soldiers would want to barrack near their armories, training fields, and/or manned fortifications. Craftsman Skinks would want to sleep near their workshops, farmers would want to sleep near the fields they work in, etc.


    I believe that there are two major extremes to use when deciding how Skinks, Sauri, and Kroxigor spend their sleepy time and a fluff writer is free to use either extreme or somewhere in between. One is that most non-Slann sleep in massive buildings that are designated as housing units. These buildings would be large and imposing and stand out on the map. The other extreme is that a city map would show zero sleeping quarters. Everyone sleeps in an alcove, back room, or corner of the place they work.

    I am open to other opinions on this, but I believe the biggest factor is comfort versus duty. By comfort I mean mostly heat. If Lizardmen have a strong preference to sleep somewhere warm, it takes less labor and resources to provide nice warm hearth fires for a small number of large sleeping quarters rather than a large number of small sleeping areas. If Lizardmen don’t mind sleeping while cold, they are going to sleep somewhere near where they work so they can attend their duties easier.


    Major Metropolises: I’m betting I’m betting a large minority would sleep near where they work, maybe a quarter to a third of the population would have the luxury of sleeping where they work, but I’m betting most workers have to travel around a lot in the course of their work that sleeping where they work isn’t feasible, so I think the remainder would sleep in large buildings set up as residential housing buildings.

    Reclaimed Ruins: Lizardmen occupying a reclaimed ruined city are probably the busiest, they have to build up critical infrastructure and defend a lot of space in a wide area with a relatively small population. They probably don’t have time to create really nice accomodations. They sleep wherever they can, not necessarily wherever they want. Huts and stilts can probably work though if they need something relatively easy to build.

    Kahoun: Kahoun are very similar to major metropolis but I’m betting they have fewer roving workers, so they don’t need proportionally as many mass sleeping areas. Maybe about half sleep in residential buildings and half sleep where they work.

    Settlements: I think the go-to shelter for Lizardmen settlements is huts built on stilts. These can be constructed fairly quickly and last a reasonably long time. They’ll probably last at least long enough for the temporary encampment to finish their work and leave. Huts on stilts will let Skinks and Kroxigor get out of the wind and rain and keep most critters from nibbling on their toes while they are sleeping.


    Lizardmen Need a Place to Work

    Apart from generic hauling of things most jobs were already covered. You need workers to make sure the city has enough food, water, and sanitation. You need people to keep the trained animals in check, keep vermin away, and keep wild animals at bay.

    Food: Skinks tend fields, orchard, and hatchers. Watch over and care for livestock, process and store food, cook and serve food, find and gather food. Deliver food to those who need it.

    Water: Dig wells, maintain aqueducts, craft and set out rain barrels, fetch water for those who need it.

    Sanitation: Dig latrines, scoop up the poop, and haul it away.

    Temples: Do everything the Slann says, and anticipate their every want and need before they need to ask for it. Keep the temples tidy, make sure the proper offerings to the gods are made, organize worshippers and visiting leaders going in and out. Transcribe scrolls either with new information or transcribing old scrolls that are wearing out.

    Animals, friendly: Train and rear work and war animals. Tend to the sick. Slaughter food animals or incurably sick beasts. Feed and care for the beasts. Keep the beasts from killing each other and the various Lizardmen.

    Animals, unfriendly: Hunting, killing vermin, frightening would be thieves of food supplies and crops.

    Fire: Gathering, storing and burning firewood.

    Defense: Guard duty over holy areas or strategic areas. Finding and killing the enemies of the Old Ones.

    Construction: Build and maintain the buildings everyone else depends on.


    There’s plenty to do. These things were already covered. There are two major work categories not covered yet in another section. Well temple duty got its own separate thread. So did defense.

    One thing that hasn’t been covered yet is delivery. Example, if a Skink hunts and gathers, his office is in the jungle (but I still believe Skinks would be build huts on stilts here and there in the jungle to use as waystations so they don’t have to sleep on the ground every night). There are probably more than a few storage cellars, drying houses, and whatnot to store and process food in the city, but I bet the foragers don’t deal with that much, they probably hand over their day’s catch at the city gates and laborers haul it away for them. There’s probably a portion of the Temple City population that does nothing but haul things from point A to point B, though almost anyone and everyone can be ordered to carry something if need be. There is no designated place for delivery since by their nature deliveries takes place anywhere and everywhere


    The other workplace you need to accommodate is manufacturing. Relative to the other Forces of Order, I’m betting the Lizardmen don’t have as much of this as their warm blooded fellows. Lizardmen don’t really need clothes but a lot of models give them clothes, if only to show status. It’s also incorporated into standards and insignia though Lizardmen are less likely to use textile banners than most other Warhammer armies. Lizardmen would have to make some textiles. Textiles can be made almost anywhere but dying tends to be messy and smelly so that would probably be on the edge of a city to avoid annoying people.

    Speaking of smelly industries. Tanneries tended to stink. Even in war torn ancient and medieval areas, the tanneries often had to be located outside the city walls. Lizardmen models have sculpted parts that look like they are made of leather. Lizardmen kill enough various beasts with varying types of hide that they would be fairly foolish not to use leather where they can. Given that they tend to have a strong sense of smell, I bet their tanneries on the outskirts of their cities too.

    Lizardmen need to forge bronze, gold, and possibly other metals into weapons, tools, and art. To avoid accidental fires, they should be kept isolated or near a water source. To help put the extra heat to good use, forges would be a good place to locate sleeping quarters through. Pottery. Lizardmen would certainly want to store things in pottery. They can also use kiln fired bricks. All that stuff that I said about where you want to put forges applies to where you want to put kilns, though notably a lot of ceramics can be air dried.

    Some stuff can be shaped or forged, but a lot of stuff has to be carved or chiseled. This can be stone tools, such as the all popular obsidian. Wood of course can be cut and carved too. While Lizardmen like stone buildings and metal tools when they can swing it, they are going to have structures and tools made out of wood too.

    Rope making, Lizardmen sculpts often show rope on a lot of warbeast modes, and you know, rope is just useful. So Lizardmen have to make rope and most pre-industrial means of creating rope were both time consuming and labor intensive.

    I’m sure I didn’t cover everything but I think I got the major categories. Anyway let’s look at how a labor force is likely organized.


    Major Metropolises: I’m betting that the Big Four have tightly regimented jobs that are very specialized. You can have a troupe of Skinks someone whose only task is to carry food to Temple Guard on duty. Everyone has a task assigned by a higher up, probably assigned at the moment of their spawning and deviation from this is frowned upon as an insult to their leaders and the Old Ones from who they derive their preordained task from. In fact without tight organization this can cause bottlenecks. “I can’t do that, that’s not my assigned task.”

    Reclaimed Ruins: This is the opposite extreme from the Big Four. There are lots of important tasks to do and not many able bodied lizards to do these tasks. Most denizens are probably trained in two or three different vocations and everyone is expected to pitch in when and where they can. Lack of flexibility is frowned upon, this an insult to their leaders and the Old Ones who require everyone to attend their sacred tasks whatever form that takes today which could be radically different from what the tasks required yesterday were.

    Kahoun: Kahoun are highly structured like the Big Four but they have to make due with a smaller group of Lizardmen shouldering the necessary tasks. That means they probably fall somewhere between the two extremes for labor organization. Kahoun Lizardmen are more likely to have more varied job skills than the Big Four but less varied and more rigid than Lizardmen dwelling in ruined temple cities.

    Settlements: A settlement is built around the completion of a single task, so everyone there is already working towards it. Not much labor to organize there given how straight forward everything is. On top of this, there are probably few if any high ranking Lizardmen present to micromanage things. They are probably pretty flexible and pragmatic about doing whatever needs doing.


    Mahrlect, that’s almost 22 pages on Microsoft Word. As always, I’d very much like to hear your feedback, what you agree with, what you disagree with, where you’d like to expand on these.


    On long things like this, do you guys prefer text laid out normally or do you like spoiler tags by category to save space. Let me know by private message or on the fluff forum feedback thread.
     
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2020
  2. Crowsfoot
    Slann

    Crowsfoot Guardian of Paints Staff Member

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    It's amazing how much detail you put into your posts ;)
     
  3. Aginor
    Slann

    Aginor Fifth Spawning Staff Member

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    Indeed!
    I will read through it all and provide comments but I cannot promise I'll do it today.
     
    Raptorclaw and Nazqua like this.
  4. n810
    Slann

    n810 First Spawning

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  5. pendrake
    Skink Priest

    pendrake Well-Known Member

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    Where did you come up with the word:

    "Kahoun" ?

    Cannot find a reference even with Google. Other than it is a somewhat uncommon surname (in English).

    (Edit)
    I even got desperate enough to try Bing! No luck. Is Kahoun a made up word like Marhlecht? The internet has not heard of "kahoun", apart from a guy who played for the Marlins, and other random persons with the surname.
    (/edit)
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2017
  6. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    Yes, check the glossary in the Lustriapedia. I got tried of saying "lesser temple city" or "smaller temple city" so I made up a synonym.

    Anyway my next lengthy detailed post will be covering the Kahoun of Klodorex in detail and hopefully mapping if I get ambitious. But while sketching out Klodorex's history I noticed I missed an event that would be better told as a piece of fiction than has generic army fluff, so that will take longer.

    Good thing I don't already have three WIP fluff pieces to occupy my time!
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2018
  7. Krai’kotak
    Skink

    Krai’kotak Member

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    Well first of all great article now to my personal opinion the lizardmen maybe have some sort of domestic animals like small reptiles or maybe large insects(in total war warhammer2 there is a mention of farms of insects to use as food) also the main city could be supplied by minor settlements.

    Respect the South American based diet well I can give a very usefull information(because I am South American¡¡¡Chan chan Chan great revelation!!!!) the Mayans and Aztecs were no exactly a civilized civilization(actually were almost tribesmen with crops and piramids) but yes they main diet was beans,corn and meat

    Respect the Inca empire well their diet was potatoes,potatoes and more potatoes no I am no joking Perú(the country of origin of the incas) has 300 types of potatoes and all with diferent flavour maybe the lizardmen could base their diet on a similar being with a certain product(not necessarily potatoes) that the old ones created just for them this “product” could grow quickly and in large quantities
     
  8. Killer Angel
    Slann

    Killer Angel Prophet of the Stars Staff Member

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    Tnx @Krai’kotak
    This thread is made of win and deserves more love
     
  9. Krai’kotak
    Skink

    Krai’kotak Member

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    Yup completely agree this post is true and pure quality and if Krai’kotak can put a small brick to support the article Krai’kotak would do it
     
  10. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    I knew potatoes were native to South America but I assumed they were an Amazon rain forest plant, not a Peruvian thing. Good to know.

    My own fluff kahoun of Klodorex is built into a mountain side (and roughly analogous to real world Peru in it's location), and they have terraced farms on the hill side of primarily potatoes. I guess Klodorex is more Incan than I thought. I chose potatoes because I figured Klodorex would want to put a root plant there so not to impede visibility on the lower mountain trails. But I guess now I can pretend I was being historically accurate.

    In my fluff pieces, I have Skinks eating potatoes fairly often. Enough that I felt comfortable replacing the English colloquialism "meat and potatoes." with "grubs and potatoes." I have not had any Saurus character eating potatoes yet.

    Other interpretations are fine, but in my fluff pieces, Sauri can eat fruit, vegetables and starches, but they don't like to. They nearly always prefer meat. Fruit and vegetables are accent foods for Sauri and starchy foods are last resort survival food for Sauri. Skinks and Kroxigor are more omnivorous. Kroxigors prefer meat over plant food, but they are consistently hungry enough that they are not picky eaters.
     
  11. Krai’kotak
    Skink

    Krai’kotak Member

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    I agree probably the old ones would make the lizardmen omnivorous to make them easy to maintain a survive and I agree in the Saurus part probably the saurus would eat vegetables and plants under strict orders the skinks would be ok a the kroxigor are just hungry boys. If you want more of my South American continent here it comes other native South American/Peruvian products are:corn,beans(not exactly beans but a certain numbers of variations),tomatoes(yes tomatoes) and palta or aguacate or avocado I don’ know how you call em all this prpducts grow in Incan terraces and some in the corps of the Aztecs and Mayan.
     
  12. Nazqua
    Carnasaur

    Nazqua Well-Known Member

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    Dont mean to commit some thread necromancy, but I dont think I actually mentioned how great this thread is in particular or the amount of times I've found myself reading it again. Great work. Something like this is undoubtedly useful when It comes to me making my own fluff, ill be sure to reference it sometime or another.
     
  13. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    I'm never opposed to thread necromancy that tells me how great my past work is!

    I did put a lot more effort into this thread, the taboo one and the religious thread than your garden variety post, so I hope people use them as resources.

    Thank you for the recent "like" bomb.
     

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