I wonder what you guys would picture if I asked you to imagine a city populated by every kind of reptilian humanoid?
Kobolds, Troglodytes, Lizardfolk, Dragonborn, Yuan-Ti, all living in one place.
I'm seeing a mixture of Tenochtitlan and the Indus valley. Huge sprawling stone temple cities built of cyclopean stones and so old they seem more a part of the landscape than a built thing. Huge temples to their somnolescent gods constructed by laborers over a hundred thousand years. A city of seeming inaction and menace, like one of the crocodiles lurking in the nearby waters of the floating gardens just outside its titanic walls. Think Skull Island from Jackson's
King Kong movie inhabited by a civilization of glory and savagery beautiful as it is coldhearted.
Each section of the city is ruled by a god-king descended (or so they claim) from one of the patron deities of the city. Whose rule is theoretically absolute but rife with the constant threat of treason and assassination from advisors, priests, and lesser nobles. The god-king rules from the largest palace complex, adjacent to the Great Temple. Each noble lives in their own complex of varying sort based on their status. A city of fortresses, inhabited by the slaves and servants of the nobles. Everything from household staff to household troops. Held by ties of tradition and magic, for only the nobles and priests may learn to wield The Art.
Just outside the city lie enormous mats of floating vegetation and soil in the shallow water of the swamp. Upon whom slaves toil growing odd crops many of which are like no human, elf, or dwarf have seen. Relics of some epoch past like the city itself. The waters teem with fish farms, protected from wildlife by steel hard nets woven from the silk of giant spiders kept in the basement of the weaver's guild. Silk that also outfits the armies and assassins of the nobles. In this city metal is for ornamentation, silk and stone and wood are for war. Enchanted into the match of any dwarven axe or mail with ancient mysticism.
Farther away past the swamp following a single great raised causeway into the foothills are the ranches of the nobles, where captive dinosaurs fed narcotics to keep them docile are raised for meat sent back to the city nobles for distribution to their followers. But it is never enough, and in the gaps between the noble compounds the law reaches only as far as your own teeth. These wretches see little of the bounty brought from the noble's farms, trapped in abject poverty and servitude. Mostly they eat each other when the need for meat grows too strong, or occasionally catch a slave outside the walls. But that brings reprisal.
Underneath in the catacombs and drainage channels of endless buried structures are the Unwhispered. Shunned for the forgotten transgression of the beginning times that saw the Gods cast them down as lowest of the low and remove their legs. Yet they are called Unwhispered for a reason. None dare speak their names too loudly. Masters of stealth, deception, and unsanctioned magics they may have eyes anywhere or in anyone. All the unspoken and unofficial needs of a decadent and corrupt civilization older than the Titans are serviced by this caste of the unforgiven. Dearly are their skills bought and never in quite the fashion intended to the misfortune of many.
