Slann

The favoured servants of the Old Ones, the Slann have considerable intellect and magical abilities, and rule the Lizardmen as venerated Mage-Priests. Although not physically menacing - their bodies are toad-like with large heads and bulbous eyes - with a flick of their multi-jointed fingers, Slann can topple cities, engulf foes in flames or open vast rents in the ground below. Enemy wizards find even the mightiest incantation they try to employ unravelling before them as a Slann contemptuously waves its hand.

There were five spawnings of Slann created by the Old Ones, each with a particular role to play in their Great Plan. No new Slann have been spawned since the departure of their creators; all the Slann alive today are those self-same ones. Without any new Mage-Priests, they are a dying race, faced with extinction. Well over half of their kind died in the Great Catastrophe, including all of the First Spawning - the wisest and most powerful of the Slann, and the only ones that had direct contact with the Old Ones. In the ages since then, many other Slann have died violendy — irreplaceable losses that are greatly lamented. With each Mage-Priest lost, the Saurus and Skinks further insulate those that remain, protecting them with their very lives.

The Slann see the world differendy from other beings. Their orderly minds are constantly at work — deciphering complex problems and wandering the cosmos. To the Slann, time passes more quickly than it does for short-lived creatures, and a Slann will regularly slip into extended periods of restful contemplation that might last decades, or even centuries, at a time. They sit unmoving on their stone palanquins or in their Star Chambers, and to an outsider a Slann might appear asleep, or even dead. So deeply do they meditate that signs of life are hard to detect - their breaths are shallow and far apart, their eyes unblinking and vacant, yet the Slann are attuned to more than mortals realise — for they can perceive the magic and raw disorder that has hung in the very air since the great influx of Chaos.

Privileged Skinks attend to the Slann, patiently waiting for the ancient beings to stir and recording their every prophecy or proclamation. Most often, however, Slann converse telepathically between themselves; they can also see through the eyes of some Skinks, such as the Priests and Oracles, and enact their will through them. Although they have lost much of their former power since the incursion of the Dark Gods into the world, the Slann are still the undisputed masters of the magical arts.

Thrones of the Ancients
During the Great Catastrophe, the world was contaminated. Since then, Slann have avoided setting even a single toe upon the earth, for this grounds their magical pouter and disrupts their thoughts. While ensconced in their pyramid-temples, the Slann are protected, but when forced to leave, they sit upon floating palanquins made of stone and other, unknown substances. A Slann controls his slab-throne’s movement with his mind, hovering motionless or moving at a respectable pace, and it shimmers with a powerful protective force field.