I get to hear from so many people that 'Being a Dark Lord is the greatest job in the world, my Lord.' Or, 'You, my Lord, have the best occupation ever!' It gets tedious but the random executions serve to take the edge off the overwhelming banality of it all.
What really drives me nuts is when I have to explain my empire building philosophy to the High Council of Dark Lords, or worse yet, the fucking Dark Overlord himself. Why the hells should I care if my stronghold "conforms to the aesthetic of the landscape"? I'm not paying for the extra artisan crafted crenelations just because my choice for a Oppression Coordination Base happens to be located in some toothily eroded granite wasteland.
I am a Dark Lord. Fuck your landscape aesthetics.
It's practically in my job description to ignore whatever the shit I feel like ignoring. So don't act all surprised when my Desert Holdfast is constructed from the calcified bones of oceangoing leviathans which were shipped at absurd expense from the Northern Reaches.
Which leads me to the topic of this entry. Slave labor vs. free market labor.
Each of these has distinct advantages and disadvantages. Many people are under the impression that slave labor is the obvious route to go since you don't have to pay slaves. But I'll let you in on a little secret, slave labor ain't free. Slaves need to eat just like the rest of us and while you can of course feed them stuff that a dog would turn its nose up at, it all costs money. Not to mention a myriad of related expenses which most folks don't take into account.
Things such as:
1) Slave acquisitions. Believe it or not most sentient creatures won't willingly sign up to be a slave of their own volition. They must be captured and forced to work. This means you must have an army of some sorts and warriors, like any skilled laborer, want to get paid. Try not paying your army or providing opportunities for them to loot, pillage and rape and you'll soon find you have no army. Three hots and a cot only get you so far...
2) Wear and tear on whips alone can be ruinous to an underfunded Dark Lord. Add in to that maintenance and upkeep of weapons and armor, which is a skilled labor that 99% of slaves are incapable of performing and the costs to sustain a reasonably efficient Fortress Building Machine can quickly become overwhelming.
3) Feeding your slaves. Sure you can feed your slaves on the corpses of their expired comrades, everyone does that. Protein ain't cheap. But most races of slaves have dietary needs that force you to include other ingredients in their feed and failure to do so will result in them dying prematurely and in greater numbers than is convenient for your fortress construction deadlines. Who would've thought that a successful empire could be lost or won for want of a few carrots? The devil is in the details, my friends.
4) Revolts. You'll get them. Even the best run Empire will eventually have to deal with slave or peasant revolts. It's annoying and a waste of costly resources, but hey, it's gonna happen. The narrative causality of the universe can't resist inserting a Hero where it's least welcome. It's a classic story and you can't fight stories, you just have to stamp them out mercilessly and with a lot of fire before they take root.
5) Organization. You try keeping 10,000 dumbfuck, half starved slaves working efficiently and not at cross purposes and let me know how that works out for ya. You have to have so much infrastructure in place to even contemplate a slave workforce, that it's seldom the most productive business model for a fledgling Dark Empire to follow. Aspiring Dark Lords are usually in way over their heads.
Skilled Labor, why not go that route?
You are going to need skilled laborers, no ifs, ands or buts about it. The average slave who is adequate for hauling blocks of stone or carrying woven baskets full of iron ore can't logically be expected to know the difference between a bodkin point and a meathook, much less how to make make either. Since you can't run an army whose spearpoints shatter against wooden shields, you must employ skilled craftsmen at all times.
The problems inherent in this are:
1) Guilds and Labor Groups. Since many of these craftsmen have skills that take years to learn, you can't just torture and kill them all willy-nilly. Well, you can of course, you're a Dark Lord and it's expected of you, but they become incredibly hard to replace if you keep killing them and your Empire suffers because of it.
2) Funding schools for the skill sets your Empire requires: Cripplingly expensive and a vast drain on resources that could be better spent on acquiring more concubines for you. But your domain will always need people who know how to make chain mail, how to temper a blade and how to make wagon wheels that don't break every other pothole. Your average pleasure slave knows nothing about any of these things, thus you have to be prepared to pay wages.
3) Payed labor is cost prohibitive. If you have to pay each and every laborer an honest days wages then you're fucked. A paid laborer is still more expensive than a slave no matter which way you slice them.
Therefore the prefect business model for a Dark Empire is a slave labor force salted with certain hard-to-replace skilled artisans who enjoy a certain amount of latitude in their decision making processes predicated on your indulgence.
Read and learn aspiring Dark Lords, I have much to teach..
-Dark Lord Herdoth
