When you've been an insanely wealthy Totalitarian Conqueror for as long as I have, you tend to start collecting stuff for no other reason than to stave off the boredom of a life without any real challenge to it. Some people collect stamps, others coins. Some like toys and others may fancy empty beer bottles for some reason.
I collect several things and fortunately for me, I can't be outbid on any of them. There is no upper limit to my financial resources, I'm not even sure how much gold I'm worth, I just know there is a silly amount of zeroes after the first number.
Silly, I say.
And in the event someone does manage to procure something I covet somehow, I just raise my bid to include my Undead Dragon with optional Undead Lich Knight NOT burning you and everything you hold dear into a tasteful silhouette etched on seared marble.
This always wins.
That being said I've collected and hoarded various things in my day, but my latest obsession is Cavalry. I've been adding crazy amounts of cavalry units to my army lately because I really like them and may have developed a minor obsession with them. The versatility and variability of the unit model alone is mind boggling, so much room for customization. There are almost endless combinations of creatures that can be ridden by other creatures, preferably with some semblance of order and in which both rider and mount are viable weapons.
Once you become a serious collector, and by that I mean a minimum of 100 different detachments of Cavalry (no duplicates), you generally start to seek out the rarest and most sought after pieces you can find. Ideally in mint condition.
So to borrow a tried and true method, here's a Top Ten list of the rarest and most fucking expensive Cavalry units in my current collection in no particular order:
1) Dinosaur Mounted Neutral Clerics: Some Clerics worship gods of negotiable moral standing and those are the ones who are able to serve Dark Lords as oftentimes donations=righteousness.
Works for me. Evil alignment Clerics aren't great at healing. They're generally are too busy cutting hearts out of virgins and raising the dead to really think about helping something else stay alive. Therefore as a Black Hearted Bastard you have to find Neutral Clerics for the bulk of your army's healing needs.
The problem with this for most lesser Evil Dicks is that these Clerics certainly aren't frontline troops: ergo to be effective at their jobs, Dark Lords with less resources than myself have to have their wounded hauled back to behind their lines to where these Mending Cunts can go to work on them.
But when you're operating at the very apex of Dark Lordery, like me, you can afford Neutral Clerics who happened to be mounted on trained Triceratops, thus negating the need to haul bleeding meat back through the thick of battle to where your Band-Aid Twats can fix em up.
They go to the wounded and do their thing. The fucking Triceratops keeps them alive while they do it. Usually. Its a fucking Battle, sometimes shit happens...
Most Dark Lords don't have these. Envy me.
2) Dire Wolf Mounted Mind Flayers : Sure, every Dark Lord worth the name has some Wolf Rider Goblins in their bag of tricks, why wouldn't you? Wolf Riding Anything are probably the very best land based scouts you can get, their efficacy varying depending on what's riding them.
Most Wolf-Rider units are goblins, spectacularly useful, but let's face it, kinda ho-hum for a serious Dark Lord. Wolf mounted Orcs are much rarer because Orcs don't get along with animals the same way Goblins do, probably because they eat them.
But both those units pale in comparison to my Direwolf Mounted Mind Flayers. The entire unit is comprised of only six Flayers astride the hugest Dire Wolves my eugenics program could produce. It may be a tiny squad compared to most elements of my forces, but in sheer destructive force, few can rival it.
A weapon that can cripple the minds of vast numbers of enemies simultaneously, thus allowing your regular troops to slog through swamps of their unresisting entrails, is invaluable.
As far as my researchers have been able to determine, there's only one other organized troop of Mind Flayers out there, and apparently they're mounted on Hippogriffs, which is awesome. I'm currently looking to buy them/kill their current owner and take them.
3) Jackalope Mounted Gnome Illusionists: Wanna create some absolute fucking chaos among your opponents? Sure you do, nothing is more fun to watch than an opposing army go all batshit on itself. For enemies of lower sophistication, i.e without adequate magical support, Illusionists are a bargain way to win the day.
A smart and efficient Dark Lord isn't going to deploy his top tier units against a teeming horde of aggressive beardfucks barely out of the Stone Age, nossir. There is way too much room for Fate to stick her fickle finger up your ass; some ONE IN A MILLION CHANCE gambit that somehow, against all laws of probability, works.*1
Nope. For primitive, numbers-based foes, you deploy the David Copperfields of your army, the Illusionist. A magic user who specializes in special effects that are easy to counter for more advanced adversaries, yet are all too real and fucking horrifying to your average 'rustics'.
They work way cheaper than real spell slingers and can be used against more worldly troops as feints and distractions while your real nightmare units wreak havoc among the enemy, penning symphonies of death, violence and terror to lull you to sleep at night.
So this particular unit of Jackalope Mounted Gnome Illusionists is only one of two known to exist. I cannot say enough about them; they are insanely agile units capable of arriving anywhere on a front within minutes. They are astonishingly effective in their role as agents of mobile chaos, providing magical cover and misdirection of defenses that might otherwise be directed against my actual sorcerous strikes.
Plus they're cute and frequently drunk, although it doesn't affect their job performance in the slightest. And who can resist big rabbits with antlers?
4 ) Snow-Wyrm Mounted Yeti Mountain Dragoon Crossbowmen: Holy Shit. Most people don't even know what a Snow-Wyrm is, much less can envison a crossbow armed Yeti sitting on it while it bears down on your screaming, trapped army stretched out through a snow-choked mountain pass. There's gonna be a lot of red and brown snow and your SWMYMDC's are gonna glide right over it, raining death and dismemberment to their blindly fleeing prey.
I find watching their snow staining antics pairs best with some brandy laced hot chocolate. Preferably from a chateau balcony, but in a pinch your campaign tent will do. It's the show that counts, not where you watch it from.
"Crossbowmen" doesn't really do this unit justice. These are Yeti, 8-9 foot tall fur covered Winter Wookies armed with what would better be described as 'small ballistas' rather than 'crossbows'. Anything that can go completely through up to 4 armored humans can't realistically be considered a 'crossbow' any more.
As Dragoons, these frightening Wampa-Fooks ride Snow Wyrms into battle, yet dismount to fight. And unlike human Dragoons, their mounts join right in independently, sinuous snow-dragons of a Eastern cast, faster than Norwegian downhillers, but bus sized with giant teeth and a Cold Blast breath weapon.
Won them in a hand of poker.
5 ) Giant-Vole Mounted Dwarven Sappers: Need a battlement toppled in a hurry? Pesky citadel walls making mincemeat of your storming attempts? Get some Dwarves, boyo. Tunnel those fortifications right the fuck under. Watch em tumble like someone blew a Magic Horn.
Dwarven Sappers are the premiere engineering units available on the open market. They command astronomical rates and are 100% worth every silver if you can find some to work for you. I can't recommend them enough.
Therefore if you're given the opportunity to procure some Giant Vole Mounted Dwarven Sappers, you say yes and pay whatever is demanded/burn whatever is necessary to get them. For those of you among my readership ignorant of low level biology, a vole is a toothier, more aggressive version of a mole which doesn't sound impressive at all until you're facing one that's thirty feet long bursting from under your defensive works bearing a screaming, armored cunt of a Dwarf on its back right before your wall collapses on you.
6) Giant Arachnid Mounted Drow Archer-Magi: Crazy-evil and merciless. The detailed atrocities these spider-knight-wizards enjoy perpetrating on your or anyone's else's behalf will both exhilarate and appall you. Like you totally get having to horrifically execute one family member after another, leading up to their Patriarch, who defied you, but there shouldn't be that much cackling and sexual arousal involved. Or games. Weird sex-murder games.
I'm mean there are standards, ya know?
Wear a codpiece for fuck's sake. We're Lawful Evil over here, show some decorum.
7) Undead Dragon Mounted Lich-Knight*2: Pretty much the pinnacle in airbourne death and misery, I currently own and operate the only airworthy Unit of this dread class. My Undead Dragon's name is Hershel and he enjoys combustible cities and towns, conflagration-assisted updrafts, large herds of reasonably easy to catch, meaty animals and the occasional Princess when he can get one.
His rider is the angry and reanimated corpse of Sir Attilus of CinderFall, an Undead Knight turned from Light to Darkness. He enjoys moonlit walks on the beach where he can eat and stomp large amounts of hatchling sea turtles to death, bludgeoning anything cute and fluffy and directing his Mount to incinerate a humble population of agrarian-based dirt-fucks because I told him to do it.
No one else in this particular world flies this Unit. I'm that good.
If you're wondering how this is a cavalry unit, then you should've read the Footnotes first.
8) War-Mammoth Mounted Stone Giant Lancers: Dark Lords of lesser standing should avoid this unit, both Rider and Mount are dumb as a box of rocks. They are useless for any maneuver more complicated than "Go that way!" and either are easily panicked to turn in fear and confusion against your own front line, creating acres of bowel-pasta among the very forces they were intended to spearhead.
Still, when attached to a force that can disintegrate them at will if the worst should happen, or is planning on them balking just for sheer entertainment's sake, they make excellent Shock Cav. Human sized opponents have very little chance of surviving a concentrated charge by Cavalry weighing in individually at an average of 8-10 tons, armored as fuck and moving at an inexorable 15 miles per hour or better.
Their various weaponry and genitalia swinging madly to and fro.
Truly terrifying Unit for the Dark Lord who can absorb the potential losses, or just doesn't care about them.
Fun either way.
9) Gargoyle Mounted Pixie-Blowgunners: Sounds improbable, right? But think about it, Pixies are the naturalist masters of rural herbicology. They can manufacture an astounding variety of potent pharmacological compounds from the bounty of the wildlands they hail from. Ergo, obtaining the services of a mercenary Unit of Pixie Pharma-Operatives who ride Fucking Gargoyles into ambush scenarios, should be a top priority for any Malevolent Prick worth the title.
It's a no brainer. And in their downtime, they can dart random people at the orgies you throw, making them more pliable to your perversions. Double win.
10) Cave Bear Mounted Cimmerians: Don't let the loincloths fool you, these sword waving muscle-heads riding semi-tame Cave Bears are a serious threat to your shield wall. You see Cave Bears, as a species, don't believe in shield walls, much in the same way as some humans don't believe in a God. It just ain't there to them really. Where's the proof?
This puts any defensive structure comprised of living creatures at serious risk; they need foes to believe in their defense, to acknowledge the potential risk of attacking their line. This lack of recognition in giant fucking Cave Bears makes this notion a weakness that their shirtless Blade-Twirling Riders will surely exploit.
They're clever enough for that.
This concludes today's topic and let me end with this advice:
Try not to suck at picking Cavalry Units. Consider all facets of the campaign, terrain chief among them. The majority of you aspiring Dark Lords out there will eventually be defeated without becoming more than a regional nuisance, easily defeated by a backwoods Cleric or Hedge Knight. You fucking pussy.
But don't let the odds discourage you. Dying is better than making barrels all day or tanning leather for the rest of a short, miserable life.
Keep your eyes on the one just above you, and have a plan...
Yours in ideological Supremacy,
-Lord Hurderoth
Like Be Law Word His
*1 See also: David vs Goliath
*2 Honestly, this is an Airborne Calvary Unit (AirCav), not strictly speaking a Cavalry Unit. But due to the fact that I have the only one of its kind AND because it does just fine on the ground too, I chose to mention it here, because of it badassedness.
Seriously. Envy me.
