Riding lizard

Riding lizards were large, sleek reptiles used as mounts by drow in the Underdark and as a food source for other creatures in the Underdark.

Description
Riding lizards were large lizards 20-22 feet long (their tails making up about half their length). They had three-toed feet with sticky pads that allowed them to cling to surfaces such as walls and ceilings. They walked upright like a deinonychus or velociraptor.

Behavior
Riding lizards preferred to take to the walls and ceiling rather than travel on the ground where predators might more easily track them. Lizards generally lived together in a pack in which the strongest individuals guard the weaker ones.

Drow often used magical means of compulsion in the training and use of riding lizards so that the lizards were both fearless and perfectly obedient.

Abilities
Riding lizards had very keen balance. They were immune to poisons and spores from centipedes, arachnids, and fungi. Trained riders could stay seated when their mount is upside-down. Lizards could run on either all four feet or just their back feet. They had infravision up to 160 feet, but they were susceptible to partial blindness due to bright light.

Combat
Riding lizards could bite, kick with their hind legs, and jump up to 50 feet horizontally and 30 feet upwards.

Ecology
Many riding lizards were raised in captivity by drow, who occasionally captured wild specimens in order to vary their bloodlines. Many drow nobles' house insignias were magically enspelled to control the mounts. Most noble houses had at least a handful of the valuable lizards, and the larger houses had entire squadrons of lizard cavalry.

Duergar considered riding lizard meat a staple of their diet.

Riding lizards ate snakes, centipedes, rats, lichen, and fungi.

Notable riding lizards

 * Byok : The mount of Tiago Baenre, killed in 1466 DR.

Appearances

 * Novels:
 * Homeland
 * Exile
 * Daughter of the Drow
 * Dissolution
 * Condemnation
 * Extinction (mentioned)
 * ''Charon's Claw
 * The Last Threshold