Centuries ago, a great human civilization rose in the southern jungles. For generations, its cities were bustling centers of commerce and scholarship in the once savage wilderness. Over time, the city’s nobles turned away from the gods of light and began to worship a dark god of serpents. Corruption spread through the civilization like a slow rot and eventually the entire empire collapsed. Its nobles were cursed with serpentine forms and its cities were overgrown by the jungle and forgotten. Today, the still-cursed descendants of the empire’s nobles still lurk in their crumbling palaces and have begun to infiltrate the new kingdoms that have risen on the edges of the jungle.
The serpent lord is an AGE system monster that I wrote for Dragon Age Oracle’s March Monster Madness contest. It is based on the yuan-ti monsters from D&D. You can read the whole entry, along with the other contest entires, on the Green Ronin message boards here (EDIT: no longer available).
UPDATE 11/2/2013: Here is an image of a nicely formatted stat block for the serpent lord:
Artwork from the AD&D 2E Monstrous Manual
EDIT 25 May 2020: Removed some dead links to Dragon Age Oracle and the old Green Ronin forums.