Minions are a vital element of any efficiently run evil empire. Even the greatest of Dark Lords will quickly go insane (or insaner) trying to micromanage each and every facet of their regime. As an avatar of malice and spite, your time is simply much too valuable to spend every second of your day overseeing the destruction of your enemies and the subjugation of your ever expanding empire.
Also if management issues begin to cut into your "me" time, you can get irritable (or more irritable) and no one likes a grumpy overlord. You may end up killing your more useful henchmen in fits of rage and while this is seen by most as business as usual, it will end up hurting morale in the long run and next thing you know, you've got an insurrection on your hands.
And those can get messy while inevitably setting back your martial goals. Best to be avoided if at all possible.
So, how does an aspiring Dark Lord go about obtaining useful and trustworthy minions? It's not like there's a Bootlicker Outlet Mall where one can just peruse lackeys until you find something you like at a great price. No, it's never that simple. But if you want 'simple' you shouldn't choose Dark Lord as a career path.
Let's take a look at some of the ways you can acquire yourself some lickspittles.
1) Find someone you would like to have work for you and kidnap their family.
This is a very easy way to add useful personnel to your forces even if that individual may be morally opposed to your hopes and dreams of crushing the world beneath your heel. For example I once approached a very well known Healer about employment opportunities with my army and she refused me. I desperately needed healers at the time because of manpower shortages and so I captured her husband and two children.
She remained fairly obstinate until I sent her a tasteful and classy belt pouch meticulously crafted from the skin of her only son's left leg. True story.
She still works for me to this day. Helluva woman.
2) Recruit the surviving minions of your vanquished foes.
No one likes to be unemployed. Starvation sucks. So after you've burned a rival Dark Lord's stronghold to the ground, scattered his armies and publicly impaled his generals, set up some job fairs or soup kitchens for his rank and file soldiers. Make them feel welcome in your better-run and much more sophisticated military machine. Let them know that the Troll Shock Troops who just went through them like Tijuana street burritos through a Canadian, could now be on their side.
Hand out some stew, bread and lots of ale and the next thing you know, his people are flocking to your banner in droves and you're not out of pocket much.
3) Keep an open door policy for evil, murderous bastards.
Seriously, some soldiers are so sick and twisted that even other Dark Lords won't touch them on the advice of their PR departments. Let it be known that there is no upper limit to the sickness and atrocity that you're willing to employ, provided that your conquest goals are being met.
Best case scenario is you form a corps of heinously malevolent psychopaths that strike crippling fear into your enemies hearts and make your job easier.
Worst case scenario is that they get so out of hand with their butchery, rape and torture that they begin to make you look tame by comparison and you end up having to put them down like rabid dogs. No harm, no foul and you got some good murder out of them before they had to be terminated.
4) Create your own Minions through dark and eldritch sorcery.
This seems like a perfect solution to all of you henching needs, doesn't it? Just make loyal minions out of the very essence of the dark ether or transform lesser beings into something greater. Saruman did it with the Uruk-Hai didn't he?
Well, it's never that easy, folks. Takes a metric fuck-ton of magical energy as well. I'm not really the sorcerous kind of Dark Lord anyway, I'm more of a evil genius, tactically brilliant, big picture kind of Conqueror.
What I can tell you is that nothing created from magic is ever foolproof. Magic in and of itself is pretty dicey to begin with and narrative causality fucking loves to turn bad things into good things, mostly just to ruin your day.
Redemption is an ugly word and I make it a point to have anyone who utters it in my presence executed in astonishingly painful ways.
Don't hear that word much anymore.
5) Set up an advanced eugenics program among your slave population and breed tomorrow's soldiers using only the finest slaves. Indoctrinate and train those slaves from day one to be loyal, unquestioning and fucking bad ass.
All of us Dark Lords do this to some extent, some with more success that others. The main problem with this system is that it occasionally produces a skilled, driven renegade that's smart enough to know to keep his mouth shut while he garners support among all the other highly trained, disaffected warriors your machine churns out.
Next thing you know you've got a revolt. A seriously dangerous revolt within your military.
I've had this happen to me once and I ended up having two halves of my army slaughter each other on the Plains of Sorrow (more foreshadowing). Got real nasty. Turns out I wasn't nearly as popular or feared as I had assumed. I was lucky enough to survive it but had to start all over again as a mere River Bully*1, reduced to beating up people who refused to pay me for using the river.
It was fucking degrading.
THE BEST GODDAMN MINION I EVER HAD WAS A SOMETHING-GIANT NAMED THOK.
Thok was unbelievably awesome. He was 30 feet tall, wielded a tree trunk for a weapon and just fucking wrecked my enemies' front lines. Fully armored paladins would fly through the air like bleeding, screaming birdseed scattered all kattywumpus about the battlefield.
It was terrible and sublime, watching Thok swat humans about like a an enraged golfer. It was buttfucking an entire army with a 30 foot dick.
Then one day this tiny pissant of a man challenges him to a fight and kills him with a slingstone. Seriously, a fucking rock, thrown from a sling probably woven from strips of goat scrotum or something like that, rustic and unsavory. It threw a stone with enough force to punch it's way into Thok's skull through his tear duct, a one in a million shot, as it were.
It was a ratfuck, obvious narrative causality dicking , just like a certain religious story you may have heard of concerning a small Jew against an enormous Philistine. That famous tale is based upon my minion Thok and his improbable slaying by the hand of one astronomically lucky little hairy-footed twat.
After he slew Thok I immediately ordered a Shock Troop full charge and captured the wee shite shortly thereafter, making him watch while my army butchered his. It's good to be a Dark Lord because I'm not really allowed to do anything honorable at all, and yet the 'good guys' are always very trusting when I seem especially sincere about a change of heart.
In the end, I ended up using the capture of the halfling to lure three of Thok's relatives to my army with the promise of vengeance, and gave the wee prick to the Giants. Despite their massive size and lumbering aspects, they were able to keep him alive for weeks....
Clever girls....
They still work for me, usually in shifts though. None of them is equal to their sire, but maybe the three acting in concert could be greater in sum than their Pop. They can sure make jam out of most small bipeds....
You Now Owe Me For My Insights,
-The Dark Lord, Hurderoth
Be His Word Law
*1 River Bully: One of the earliest levels of the Dark Lord class. Even earlier levels include: Lunch Room Big Kid, Aggressive Goatherd and Early Onset Megalomaniac.
