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| Heirs of the lizardmen?
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I was reading Joseph Manola's
absorbing posts on the history of Warhammer when a thought struck me about that the Skaven. They weren't the first species to scuttle under the surface of the Old World. No - that was the lizardmen. Here's what the Battle Bestiary for the second edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle has to say about them:
Lizardmen are curious in that they appear all over the world, wherever there are mountain ranges with deep caverns. Perhaps these are all linked up far below the earth.
By the third edition, lizardmen were still associated with deep caverns and still attacked the underground dwellings of orcs and dwarves from below. But the notion of the global linkage of their lairs had gone. That had now been transferred to the Skaven (introduced to second-edition Warhammer in the Citadel Journal of spring 1986). The third-edition rulebook has this to say:
Skaven are widespread throughout the entire world, but their presence is rarely felt. A web of tunnels crosses from continent to continent, leading to burrowings far below the cities of men, and eventually into the sewers and drains of the cities themselves.
In the 1986 Citadel Journal, the Skaven's origins are linked to the Slann: they are the descendants of giant rats that gnawed on warpstone in the ruins of Slann civilisation. Their global presence is there from the start, but the idea that their tunnels connect the continents isn't explicitly stated. As far as I know, none of the early material posits the idea that Skaven and lizardmen tunnels might intersect. I suspect one had to be repositioned in the background to make room for the other.
From the third-edition Warhammer Armies book onwards, the lizardmen were reduced from independent subterranean raiders to slaves of the Slann (in those army lists, they appeared only as auxiliaries of the Slann armies). In later editions, they
became the Slann armies as the latter went from amphibian warriors to bloated, solitary magicians. And their globe-spanning tunnel network was no more - or was left to the rats.
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| The original subterranean globe-trotter? |
It leaves the door open for a campaign of claustrophobic tunnel wars between lizardmen and Skaven.
ReplyDeleteIt does! I like how the early Warhammer stuff alludes to a history of subterranean warfare between dwarves, orcs and lizardmen. Although the idea of subterranean reptiles doesn't make a huge amount of sense, there's a certain sort of pulpy resonance there - and there's also the long association of dragons with underground places.
ReplyDeleteI personally loved the idea of Lizardmen as the original inhabitants of the Warhammer World, driven underground by the Old Slann, starting history well before the arrival of Chaos with a cosmic injustice perpetrated by the wise civilzed aliens against the primitive inhabitants of the planet. It felt really Warhammer-y. I also liked the idea of Lizardmen being extremely violent, aggressive and impossible to communicate with because of their "different" brain and their strange language.
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