Scales?! At your table? It's more likely than you think! (Patreon)

Sorry about the interrobang, that was unwarranted. Continuing my foray into player species, today we've got a veritable slew of scale-havers; Lizardmans, Yuan-Ti, and Wyrmlings.

Now, playable dragons might be a stretch at a lot of tables, but this isn't for a lot of tables; it's for the table that wants to have full-blown dragon PCs. Is it balanced? Eh. It's a flying race and has all the issues that entails, but it shouldn't break your game worse than any other species with at-will flying. They can eventually do a bigger breath weapon than a dragonborn, but less often and with a full action instead of an attack substitute, and it really benefits from feat investment if they want to do it more than once a day, or if they ever plan to benefit from a short rest.

Yuan-Ti get a feat chain for pursuing the occult rituals of serpentine ascent and eventually becoming a full Anathema; I do actually have specifics for those rituals tucked away in their monster entry, but I left them off here because I expect a campaign with playable yuan-ti might want to implement less-dreadful rituals than the ones I designed. I'm a little on the fence about the balance of the 3rd ritual; I don't think it's broken at level 19 on its own, but anything that adds a significant amount of bonus damage to every Unarmed Strike (like being a Monk) is going to push them over that edge. I'm worried that cutting it down at all will make it feel like you didn't really reach that anathema mountaintop though, you know? Let me know if you've got a thought on the matter.

Lizardfolk might seem a little tame in comparison, but are probably the pick of the bunch I'm most excited to play myself; they struggle in the cold, lose fewer turns to conditions, and get a feat to change their coloration to match their environment when they're not wearing armor, exactly like how a chameleon doesn't.

Finally, I've got a fresh batch of dino-splorers from Cobramode, perhaps less nasty than the last ones but still worthy of love. These ones aren't a playable race quite yet, but I'm planning to check in with Erin and Andrea and see if they want their setting's guys enspeciated; let me know if that's something any of y'all would want to play around with.

Species - Wyrmling

Species - Yuan-Ti

Species - Lizardfolk

Dinovian Explorers