Background: Lizardmen

One of the prominent sapient races of the Solar system, lizardmen are found on both Venus and Mars. On Mars they're a nomadic, desert-roaming species that follows animals to hunt and plants to gather. While the tripod Martians tend agricultural settlements along the canals of the red planet or build cities at the pyramids where canals meet, the lizardmen rove over the deserts going from oasis to oasis in a cyclical pattern, each tribal band moving at its own pace and over its own pattern to keep from consuming all the resources of the barren desert world. The Bedouin tribes on Earth are a very rough parallel to the red lizardmen and their society. The Native Americans in the 500 Nations tend to accept lizardmen as plains nomads, hunters and gatherers with different skins, seeing the similarities more than the differences. In more settled areas, opinions differ from place to place--Tejas is known for having several enclaves of red lizardmen (the scrubland, harsh as it is, is still slightly more forgiving than the Martian desert). The USA and Peachtree offer full citizenship to lizardmen, just as they do to other immigrants. There are tiered civil rights in the CSA and lizardmen are allowed the second-highest selection of rights--they can own property but not vote, and are allowed to have children if they desire. In Deseret, they're viewed as soulless but not worth provoking (the one attempt to issue a bounty on lizardman skins resulted in the total loss of the raiding party sent out against them). Citizenship in the nation of Deseret is not available for lizardmen characters.

Skirmishes between tribes of lizardmen on Mars are relatively uncommon, but during drought years fights for resources are not unknown; similarly, the cities and farms the tripod Martians tend are generally left alone by the lizardmen although trade is frequent between the nomadic lizardmen (who tend domesticated livestock while roaming) and the tripods (who grow crops in the bands of fertile soil on the sides of the canals).

Although they currently do not have any spacefaring capabilities, there are genetically identical lizardmen on Venus, with green skins instead of red. Each type is capable of interbreeding with the other type of lizardman; the red or green females lay a single egg which hatches after four months or so. Half the time a green lizardman is born from a union between the two types, and half the time a red one is hatched. Because both types of lizardmen can interbreed and produce a fertile offspring, they don't consider the other color of lizardman to be a different species or race (possibly the part of their psychological makeup most confusing to human observers). Lizardmen born on Earth have been green or red; some Scientific Naturalists expect that a blue or brown skin tone will develop after enough generations on Earth but so far none have been observed. Occasionally (one in several hundred births) an albino lizardman is born--in game terms they are completely identical to red or green ones but have scales of a green so pale it's almost white and belly scales that are a pale yellow that's also nearly completely white.

Both the red and green lizardmen possess little in the way of advanced technology; the need to keep moving on the Martian deserts to keep from exhausting resources that replenish slowly kept them from making cities, and cities tend to lead to technological developments (the metalworkers that lizardmen do have tend to be seen as eccentric, choosing to stay at a trading post or caravan meeting place to work metal rather than walk the planet with their tribes). After making contact with humans from Earth, both red and green lizardmen have taken to gunpowder weapons enthusiastically; hunters used to bows, slings or atl-atls found the range, accuracy and power of a musket or rifle to be extremely desirable. A typical green lizardman of Venus can be seen here bearing a wood-and-stone weapon and bronze shield and here with a bronze axe and shield; lizardmen also have techniques to make shields out of the shells or bones of Martian animals and monsters; similar to the buffalo-skull shields used by Native Americans in the real world, there are some bone or shell shields capable of deflecting rifle bullets.

Magic use has meant the difference between survival and death for both individual lizardmen on Mars and their tribes; diviners capable of finding food and water in the desert and priests capable of purifying stagnant or contaminated water are respected members of the community and their input tends to be sought on important matters. War chiefs (fighters and rangers) are also valued for their ability to hunt and to protect the bands of lizardmen from the myriad dangers in the Martian desert.

On Venus, the different environment led to a different society developing. The green lizardmen also work with wood, stone, bronze and leathers to build cities (I'm using Aztecs as a rough template for their cities and society without the emphasis on hundreds of religious sacrifices). The lizardmen cities on Venus tend to have high stone walls surrounding them with entry and exit via stone bridges; frequent monster attacks in the past presumably led to this construction but generally now the lizardmen are left alone by the jungle-dwelling Jaguar Men and the cave-dwelling Chiropterans (bat people).

Just as it is with humans, occasionally a lizardman (from Venus or Mars or born on Earth) doesn't fit in with the usual expectations their society has for them and they