What is it like to be a saurian?

Saurians aren’t even a player Kin, and they’re only present in a dozen hexes on the map of the Ravenlands. They’re clearly only in the book because someone looked at the standard D&D-type Kin they’d done, and realised that they hadn’t done lizardmen yet. They’re basically described as yet another primitive proud warrior race, and that annoys me (see also: why I’ve banned wolfkin in my game).

Still, they’re an official Kin, so we may as well ask ourselves: what should people with crocodile heads living in a swamp be like?

The weakness of the official account

Once you get rid of world-building stuff like where they can be found, and plot hooks like what they could be up to, there’s not much to be said about saurians. Unfortunately what there is is somewhat self-contradictory.

What are we told saurians are like?

Saurians are humanoids with crocodile heads. They can swim underwater for fifteen minutes at a time, and they’ve tamed (if not domesticated) crocodiles. They trade with their neighbours to some degree: buying metal and other manufactured objects, because they don’t have any major technology, and selling bread root, purple shells and other raw materials. Otherwise they warn everyone to stay out of their swamps.

The weirdest thing is their dietary habits: “Saurians are unable to chew. They can cut their prey up in little pieces and devour them without chewing but prefer to let carcasses ferment to the point of falling apart, and then rip pieces from them” (GM’s Guide, p. 69).

The main problem is: how could such a Kin have arisen, and then survived the competition with dwarves, elves, hobbits, and later on humans? If you wait until your food rots, that’s a lot of nutrition that you’re throwing away; typically, carrion feeders are niche specialists rather than apex predators, rushing in opportunistically to nick bits of a carcass that the big beasts aren’t bothered with because they’re already full. If the saurians are the dominant species in the swamps, but they ignore their kills for days or even weeks waiting for them to reach their ideal consistency, why hasn’t some other species emerged that will steal the newly-killed meat, use it to grow strong, and whittle away the numbers of the now-starving saurians?

One possible solution is that the crocodiles are in fact the dominant species in their relationship, and humanoid Kin have mistaken the saurians for the dominant species because they parochially assume that the humanoid body form is inherently better; the saurians haven’t actually tamed the crocodiles, but are in fact tolerated as useful servants by the crocodiles. The problem with this theory is that it’s not clear how the saurians are better-equipped than the crocodiles to do anything in the swamps. Why do the crocodiles get out of humouring some humanoids with crocodile heads? Without significant tool use or the opportunity to run after your prey relentlessly, what good is the humanoid body shape in a swamp?

Why live in a swamp, anyway?

Of all of the terrain types in the Ravenlands, swamps and marshes are probably the least inherently desirable. They’re too wet to walk through and too dry to sail through, full of annoying biting insects, and you can’t grow crops in significant quantities. Modern-day environmentalists enthuse about the sheer number of species found in wetlands, but a millennium ago when people had the sort of technology that people do in the Ravenlands, everybody who had swamps wanted to drain them so they could turn them into fields.

We’re told “Saurians can dam waterways, just like beavers, to expand their marshland territories” (GM’s Guide, p. 68). Presumably they’d normally be thwarted by thwarted by (looking at the map of kins) elvenspring, humans and maybe orcs. But judging by what we know of the blood mist, it’s fair to say that once it realised what it was doing, and started leaving people alone who seemed to belong (goblins, Rust Brothers, nomads etc.), saurians must have had free reign to turn all sorts of neighbouring land into swamps.

But if you look at a map of the Ravenlands, the only swamps of significance are in Lake Harga, in the Blush (the delta of the Elya), and Backwater Bay (the delta of the Yendra). If the saurians were really into relentlessly expanding their territory, most of Moldena should have been swamps after 200+ years of unchallenged saurian expansion.

(They’re said to be found in the Elya river between Lake Harga and the Blush, but are less aggressive there; this is presumably because they’re only there because they’re travelling between Lake Harga and the Blush. Easily two thirds of all of the rainwater that falls on the Ravenlands is in the Elya at this point: the Coldwater, Seyster and Foolswater, among others, have drained the north and north-west via Lake Varda, and the Wash has drained Harga and the south-west. The Elya is by now a very large river: it might be wide and slow now that it’s in the plains, even shallow at points, but there’s no way it’s a swamp.)

Who wants to live in a swamp?

What if, instead, the reason for living in a swamp is comparatively simple: because nobody else wants to?

Neyd and Flow, it is said, organised the waters of the Ravenlands into rivers and lakes; “Only the waters of the marshes remained unruly, but since Flow loved her element in all its capriciousness, she allowed them to stay that way, even though marshes have been considered godless lands ever since.” (Raven’s Purge, p. 19) This feels like the sort of place that nonconventional people would seek out!

Being a saurian is a choice

The GM’s guide is full of muttering about how various monsters might have been a result of sorcerers experimenting with forbidden magics. Canonical wolfkin are explicitly traduced as “they must be really demons” (GM’s Guide, p. 67), but for some reason Saurians escape these accusations.

That’s weird, because the simplest reason for Saurians is that they’re the result of a spell that gives people crocodile heads.

What does the spell do? Most obviously, it gives you a crocodile head; and a tail, because tails are awesome. You don’t have technology that gives you textiles that will keep you warm and dry in the water, and not rot, so if you’re going to be wandering around basically naked you’ll probably gain a bit of a layer of blubber under your skin, so you’re not cold all the time. You may as well get a general boost to overall happiness all the time, because otherwise you might get unhappy just hanging around in a swamp with nothing to do. The spell – and being a Saurian – is all about “I don’t want to worry about ordinary stuff; I just want to live in a swamp, have a crocodile head and have fun”.

Let’s say also that two or more saurians can cast the spell as a ritual to turn another non-saurian into a saurian, and that’s the only way you get new saurians. (That carefully avoids the adolescent angst of “I never asked to be a saurian! I hate you, crocodile-head dad!”)

If that’s your goal, then life is pretty good! You live somewhere nobody else wants to, you’ve got some relaxed buddies who can help you out, you’re adapted to the place (if you were previously human this might be a subconscious worry that’s now suddenly been silenced), and nobody’s yelling at you to do some bullshit farming task or everybody’s going to die.

No history or technology is a choice, not a weakness

The GM’s Guide says “Not much is known about the origins or habits of the Saurians. They do not keep records of their own history” (p. 69). This might be to categorise them as yet another proud warrior race, or to let GMs make up their own answers without fear of contradiction. But it definitely reads as an uncertainty that needs to be resolved.

A proper saurian (which is to say: any saurian) would reply: we don’t know about our origins because we don’t care.

Not caring about stuff is, in fact, the hallmark of a saurian. If a saurian sounds out someone – human, elvenspring, dwarf, hobbit even – and says “hey, fancy getting a crocodile head and hanging out in the swamp?” and they say “I’d love to, but I have duties / a family / a burning vengeance against someone who slighted me”, well, that’s as far as it goes. But if they say “sure; none of the bozos in my village matter to me, and I’m sure they wouldn’t miss me if I was gone”, well, that’s a cue to start asking around for someone who remembers how the sacred ritual is supposed to work.

Technology? It’s possible, I suppose, that a saurian could have recruited an introverted, slightly autistic blacksmith, so now there’s a guy with a crocodile head who really likes banging on molten metal with a big hammer. Living in the middle of a very big and damp swamp will (ahem) cool their ardours, but they’ll find a way. Still, you wouldn’t expect this to happen often.

A lot of technological innovations happened because the alternative was people starving. If the swamps can feed the saurians easily, why bother?

Much saurian behaviour is about keeping the mundanes out of the swamp

If the point of hanging about in the swamp with a crocodile head is to have a good time without people bothering you, then you need to make sure they don’t follow you and ask you awkward questions like “what are you doing here with your crocodile head on?”

This is pretty easy, because as mentioned earlier, swamps aren’t places most people want to live in at the best of times. It doesn’t take much effort to dissuade them entirely (which is good, as not much effort is one of saurians’ favourite things).

So sure, put up signs saying “intruders are et”, “strangers be meat” as per the GM’s Guide. Set up trading posts so there’s some contact with outsiders: if saurians were completely secret, that would invite expeditions determined to find out what the saurians were hiding, but if there’s a mundane and boring explanation, most people will be happy with that. Harvest some purple shells that orcs like, and from time to time exchange it for some trivial metal items: that makes the pedlars feel like they’ve got one over you. “The stupid saurians don’t realise how valuable the purple dye is to us, or how cheaply we can make the dull knives we buy them with”, they’ll go, not realising that the trade is almost entirely bullshit.

Many saurian behaviours are also about confusing the mundanes

There are three other lines of defence against inquiry that saurians use. The first is creepy windchimes: from time to time, an explorer of the saurians’ swamps will come across a small sculpture made from driftwood, topped with animal or Kin skulls (maybe the saurians have done… weird things to the skulls, to make them extra creepy), and with a variety of sound-producing items (hollow wood, metal, glass beads, anything that makes an interesting noise) dangling from threads. The smallest gust of wind is enough to make them knock against each other and produce a variety of different sounds, which can be heard from far away given how sound travels in a swamp.

The saurians use the windchimes as navigation beacons – useful to have in a flat swamp without obvious landmarks – but that’s not obvious to an explorer who’s been hearing these weird discordant chimes for hours.

The second thing saurians do to deter inquiries is the “wallowing in rotten meat” thing. The GM’s Guide (p. 69) says “They prefer to do so during a feast, such as a whole family tearing ripe carrion apart in their special feasting pond. This diet makes them stink and we won’t even talk about their breath.” This makes no sense if this what saurians do all the time, for reasons mentioned earlier: you need to throw away a lot of perfectly good nutrition if this is how you have to eat. But if it’s another con, to make any explorers absolutely disgusted by the secret stuff that saurians get up to, and decide they want nothing further to do with these appalling creatures, well, that makes a lot more sense.

The final defence against explorers is even simpler: there’s nothing to find. There aren’t great pyramids constructed out of mud bricks cleverly disguised by vegetation, fake hills or swamp magic; there are no hidden underwater lagoons where saurians and crocodiles engage in blasphemous rituals; hell, there are barely any saurians at all, and those that there are don’t have much stuff. If your daily activities consist of hanging out in the swamp and just appreciating life, you’re not going to leave much in the way of tracks of evidence for a detective or treasure-hunter to go on.

Why put saurians in your game?

The most obvious answer is: swamps (or marshlands as the map legends calls them) are one of the 13 different legends on the Ravenlands map, and the players will go there eventually. You may as well put creepy windchimes in them, and mysterious guys with crocodile heads.

If you’re using the Book of Beasts, there are a few monsters that are swamp-specific that might benefit from having intelligent Kin neighbours. Saurians won’t be bothered by Bog Men (p. 19) because they have so little stuff, but Mire Drakes (p. 59) are canonically found exactly where saurians live, and they’re excellent. Water Trolls (p. 111) also like their meat very ripe; whether that’s a link worth investigating or a convenient red herring is down to you.

But perhaps most importantly, it gets monotonous when everything in your game is the same. Combat is always deadly; everybody is racist; people struggle to survive, and their rulers are awful. What if you got a break from this from time to time?

Obviously on the rare occasion when your players go to an elf village, that’ll be amazing. But there should be moments of quiet delight elsewhere as well, in places where they were never expecting them. Like, for instance, a wet and muddy swamp, which originally seemed really creepy and threatening, but turns out to just be a place where slightly weird people with crocodile heads hang out. And one of them has come forward with one of their Kin’s carefully-guarded words of wisdom, which will have made this trip completely worth it. (FIXME)

“Hey, wanna go look at cool birds?”