Evil Overlord Insomnia

It has been a considerable length of time since I last cast forth pearls of wisdom for you eager swine. I would apologize, if I could work up the insincerity. The truth is I am a rather grumpy Evil Overlord at the moment, and haven't got the energy to spare.

I've certainly been busy, what with the trammeling of peasants and the beheading of plotters, and usually a busy Gar the Pitiless is a happy Gar the Pitiless. But lately I have suffered from difficulty sleeping, and the lack of rest is telling on my generally cheerful disposition.

The first handful of nights, I shrugged it off, owing to recent stress involving certain difficulties renegotiating a contract with beings from the nether plane. But even after the dispute was resolved (satisfactorily, I might add; these infernal creatures care mainly about quantity, not quality in regards to souls, and I've got absolute scads of villages under my domination, filled with the useless elderly and infirm, nearly all of them with perfectly servicable souls), I have had great difficulty in getting a good night's rest.

I swear, without a decent night's sleep I just feel less than human in the morning. And all the wailing and hair-pulling and heaping-of-ashes and the banging outside my Stronghold gates, from the relatives of the villagers I sacrificed to Hoth the Devourer, simply isn't helping matters. You'd think they'd have a little human decency and keep it down in the wee hours of the morning, at the very least.

I mean really. It's not like their dear old Granny or whomever is dead. She'll be perfectly fine up until the moment she keels over. Certainly, once she dies she'll experience an eternity of torment in the gullet of a demon, but it's not as if her relatives are going to get postcards from the afterlife explaining all that she's going through. Honestly, these peasants have no sense of proportion.

Well. I can't say that I've necessarily passed on any advice that will further your designs on Total Domination tonight, but the writing of this has passed a half hour that I would otherwise have spent staring up at my bedroom ceiling, so I suppose it was worth it. Now to test out the boiling oil I had my troops install at the Stronghold gates this afternoon. It had better be flammable. I specifically told them to make it flammable.

On the hiring of anyone with the appellation "Mad": Just don't.

While there may well be uses for the insane in some (very) specialized organizations, I have yet to discover one in my own. This includes the criminally insane. Essentially, the point to be made here is when you hire/intimidate/blackmail someone into performing a task for you, what you want is results - predictable, calculable results that you can plug into your grand scheme. What you get, when hiring unhinged loons (and they all are, your Evil geniuses, Mad Scientists, Crazed Sorcerers et. al.) is chaos.

And anyway, why would you want to hire a mad scientist when there are so very many sane scientists out there willing to invent and improve upon the most heinous technology, and for nothing more than a decent wage and modest benefits? Sure, the mad scientist or crazed magician may be willing to work for free, just to prove his theory correct. But you have to remember two things here:

1) By and large, you get what you pay for, and
2) he or she is not working for you , or to advance your interests, but to prove their mad theory correct. He/she is in the grip of an obsession. And he/she is bug-f*ck crazy.

You do the math. Cutting corners is a bad idea.

A final thought: If you simply can't help yourself and decide to take a chance on the Mad Alchemist of Prrng or whomever, make sure you give him or her a research facility, far, far away from anywhere you might mind seeing turned into slag. It also wouldn't hurt to name the facility after a dead relative of your worst enemy, e.g. "The King Gustus Memorial Institute for the Advancement of Magics" or the like. That way, when things inevitably go spectacularly wrong, public backlash is channeled ina useful direction.

The Last Evil Overlord List You Will Ever Need

It has come to my attention that there are several lists advising prospective Evil Overlords on what/what not to do (here, here and here being good examples). All of these lists bear a suspicious resemblance to one another.

Being magnanimous as well as pitiless, I thought I myself would write write down a concise, thoroughly original list on what to do to become a successful Evil Overlord:

1. Do whatever Gar the Pitiless says I should do.
2. Do not do anything Gar the Pitiless says I should not do.

How simple I make things for you, and how little you appreciate it.

Evil Opportunity Employer

It is with no little contempt that I view those who aspire to Total Domination who, through an accident of birth or fortune, already hold high position in life. You know the sort. The Parricidal Princes, The Grand Viziers, The Dowager Empresses. For some reason we are supposed to applaud their 'cunning', when they've done the political equivalent of stepping from a scented bath into a warm robe held out by a servant. Bah.

Myself, I come from a long line of dirt farmers. Literally. Our lands were cursed, and could grow nothing. We also had a good sideline in stones. Due to the curse-induced seismic and meteorological activity, however much we dug out of the frozen, snow covered ground the day before, more was there the next day, awaiting the pick axes and shovels.

Being the youngest of thirteen, it was decided I was to have an education. Which was better than wielding a shovel, but also meant that, due to the curse, I had to walk ten miles to school and back each day in the snow, uphill, both ways. I like to think the experience toughened me for the travails inherent in the uphill climb towards Total Domination.

The point here is that Evil, unlike 'Good', is egalitarian and meritocratic. It cares nothing for birth, lineage, station or fate. Your typical hero? A handsome prince or feisty princess, or the same robbed of their birthright, or some pig farmer 'destined' to fulfill a prophecy (and incidentally, found a new lineage of handsome princes and feisty princesses).

Such is the modus operandi of the opposition. You'll find not a homely or overweight one in the bunch. It sickens me, it truly does. My own policy on the hiring and advancement of staff is strictly merit based. They are all self-made men and women. Literally, in some cases.

At the end of the day, I couldn't care less how many tumors or buboes your face may harbour, though I might politely request you sit at the other end of the table when it comes to organization-wide meals. You say you're the twisted offspring of a cannibalistic she-troll and a dark sorcerer? I say you've got the best of two worlds. Leprous seers, corpse-eating ghouls, swamp witches with the evil eye, they've all got their place under the vast umbrella of evil, because what matters at the end of the day are results.

Just remember who you work for, I remind them periodically. Or else.

There is no I in team. Perforce, Evil Overlords do not have teams.

In the previous post, it was asked where I stand on begging for my life. This is an interesting question, and one that bears looking at in some detail.

For the vast majority of Evil Overlords, utter domination is not simply handed them on a plate (more on this in a post to come). Most of us struggle, fight, claw, backstab and poison our way to the top. It is a singular profession, a solitary calling, and partnerships are doomed to degenerate into bloody, non-revenue generating, tax base destroying civil wars. Three may rule a kingdom, if two are dead.

With that in mind, I am not ashamed to admit that my career has not been without its periods of setback. When you can rely only on yourself, it is almost a certainty that you will at one time or another be captured by the enemy, double crossed, etc., especially in your early days. The thing to remember when you have fallen into the clutches of an adversary is that the most important person in the entire world is you. Anything- absolutely anything- is acceptable if it leads to a positive outcome regarding your continued existence.

Some may call it megalomania, this idea that I am the most important person in the universe. I call it enlightened self-interest. I call it that, because I have an utter certainty that if I cease to exist, then all of you little people disappear. Now I might be wrong, but is it really worth it to take the chance? I think not.

So. When captured by an adversary and tortured, threatened with torture, or even looked at in an especially unfriendly way, I say and do anything that has the slightest chance of continuing my existence. I would (and have) sold my own mother into slavery in such situations. I mean, I always buy her back at a later date, and the first time I was faced with being impaled on a sharpened stake. And because she's my mother, she's somewhat obliged to forgive me. Best of both worlds, really.

Finally, the thing an Evil Overlord must always remember, no matter how deeply our pride or vanity might be wounded, is that words are just a bit of air we press out of our lungs across our vocal cords, while a sharpened stake through the abdomen is, well, a sharpened stake through the abdomen. And once you're in the grave, it's incredibly difficult to wreak your revenge. Especially if you are forced to wear a girdle keep your innards from falling out.

Evil Overlord Mantra When Captured by an Adversary:

I am the most important me I will ever have.

"Fair" Fights

"Your enemies want you to be stupid and ineffectual, just like them. Well you know what? Screw them, that's what." -Xulthar the Reviled

The same mouth-breathers who complain about your actions being "wrong" and "evil" will also rail against your so-called 'dishonourable' acts. This generally boils down to the fact that an Evil Overlord will under no curcumstances 'fight fair'. Your job is not to engage in fair fights. Your job is to win. Therefore you will make the fight as unfair as possible. The last thing you want is a level playing field.

How many times has my Army of Doom captured some hapless hero and brought him to me (rather like a cat with a rodent, actually; distasteful, but they mean well), whereupon the prisoner demands I fight him in 'honourable combat' or some other version of the same?

First, honourable combat is a feature of the code of chivalry, which is reserved for the nobility. I am not a member of the nobility. By the fool's own rules I'm not obliged to comply with his request. Second, even if I was nobly born, I'm not stupid. He's spent his whole life training to stick a sharp length of metal into his enemies, whereas I had better things to do with my time. How on earth would that ever be a 'fair' fight?

It boggles the mind. Like I'm actually going to tell my troops to stand aside while I fight this muscle-bound ox one to one. Look, Sir Whatever of Wherever, you were captured. You already lost. You are, essentially, already dead. So why on earth would I allow you the opportunity to cut me in half with that humping great longsword my men have already taken away from you? Do I look like I was dropped on my head as a child?

I mean really. Have some class. Your whining about me being 'dishonourable' is really you whining about the fact that you aren't getting a second chance that you simply don't deserve. Be a man and go get beheaded without all the snivelling.

Enforced hiatus over

My apologies for the lengthy delay between posts. We had an eensie weensie coup attempt, and I found myself briefly housed in my own Pit of Doom. Then there was the escape, the destruction of the enemy, the burning and pillaging of sympathiser villages, the days upon days of racking my brains for ingenious and ironic tortures.... In other words, life sometimes interferes with higher pursuits. One must always be on guard against the daily grind. And traitors.

In any case, today I offer only one small, albeit key bit of advice concerning the mindset of an evil overlord, brought to mind when the rebels dropped me down the Pit of Doom: Always think ahead. They didn't. If they had, they might have asked themselves if I had ever actually dispatched an enemy in this fashion.

While they would have come up with many rumours to that effect, if they'd bothered to track them down they would have found that it had always happened to a friend's brother's uncle or some such. Because, really, why would I have a humping big hole in the floor of my throne room, where I might accidentally fall in, never to return? In actuality the Pit is a rather nicely furnished studio apartment, complete with running water and an extensively stocked pantry. And an escape tunnel. And my reserve Army of the Undead.

Having the Pit is a good (meaning fear-inducing) PR move, and it usually keeps my minions in line, knowing they might be tossed in if they displease me. In actuality, I get rid of enemies in far less spectacular, and far more efficient ways.

And so should you.