"Mistakes, to the wise, are but future victories..."
-Me, just now
In the course of a long fruitful Dark Lording career, you're going to make mistakes. It's inevitable. The question is do your mistakes, whether A) large and catastrophic or B) an accumulation of many smaller idiot things you did, bring you down, as a Grim Lord?
Well, let me tell you from experience, either scenario sucks. What separates the beheaded from the axemen is how you deal with the consequences for your poorly thought out decisions.
In certain Dark Lord circles I'm the poster boy for lip draggingly shortsighted rulers, though not to my face, not any more. Not if they like having skin. For those of you familiar with my back story, you can skip this part, it's just a historical flashback.
I was born into a prosperous, up and coming Empire. My Father, the motherfucking Emperor, inherited the keys to the kingdom from my Grandmother, a wicked old bitch who lacked both morals and intellectual rivals and thus established a commercial empire that my Pop then went all geographical on. He figured that ruling another country by economic proxy was only half as fun as overrunning their borders, gutting a certain percentage of the elite and burning a bunch of stuff down. Even if he had to rebuild it later because it ended up being critical infrastructure. But that was just his style, he was a product of the times that produced him.
My 'mistake' actually fell into category "B" of the Dark Lord Misjudgement list: an accumulation of many smaller idiot things I did.
I was utterly unprepared to succeed my Dad despite his lukewarm attempts to mold me to his visage. He tried but it was always from afar since he was usually on campaign against whomever his latest enemy was at the time. He had people in place to guide me into becoming the kind of merciless, single minded successor he would have wanted, but since he was far away and I was the fucking Prince, I pretty much did what I wanted to do.
Which was to fight, party, fuck, fight some more, drink again, feast, possibly sleep a bit, fuck some more and just generally be a spoiled cunt.
His steadfast refusal to have me assassinated still astonishes me and was considered a poor choice by his advisors and council and for the record I agree with them. He should've had me bludgeoned at an early age. If I'd had a kid like me, I would've had myself killed. Luckily for me ole Pops had a problem fathering man-children. I have 73 sisters and my only surviving brother is more teeth and hair than can collectively be identified as human.
So imagine my surprise one day when I was touring with my death-lute power-trio band, POWERLUST and suddenly my Father's personal guard floods the place, killing anyone who didn't flee. As they cleared the place of my awesome band's would-be audience my Father staggered to my room, clearly severely injured.
He told me that he'd been disemboweled but had stitched himself closed with his own pubic hair so that his innards didn't slosh around too much, and that he'd also been poisoned, shot with arrows, run over by Llama Calvary, hit with a fireball, cursed, insulted and rapped in the noggin with a morningstar once or thrice, he'd lost count.
And that it was time for me to Succeed him and assume the mantle of leadership over the Empire. And by Succeed he meant for me to "finish him off with any handy nearby bludgeon or blade that might come to hand, and be fucking quick about it ya fucking wastrel!"
I tried my best with a small bronze statue of a gargoyle that I carried with me because it looked cool when I was a madman on black lotus. I picked it up and whomped the shit out of him with it, but he still criticized me in between blows, things like "I don't have all day" and "Would you fucking hit my temple already? Pretty-fucking-please? Thank you so much."
But I was so blanked on opium and Elven Soul-Tar at the time that I just giggled and tapped his face until he seized the gargoyle from me and jabbed it with characteristic authority through his remaining eye, which burst with squelching disapproval and annointed me as the new Emperor.
Slathered in Pop's eye-goo and higher than a Tibetan whore, greatness was thrust upon me at that moment.
It took me just under three years to throw it all away, completely destroy my Empire and barely escape with my life.
But that's what happened. My mighty army annihilated itself on the Plains of Cliche or something like that, and not a single soldier was left alive to pursue me. So I started over as a River Bully (but to be honest it was more of a Creek Thug) and worked my way to where I am today, end of flashback.
Needless to say, that's what kickstarted my adulthood. Luckily for me I was born of hardy stock and I enjoyed fighting as much as I did wenching and annihilating my brain cells. I fought my way back to the top and then established a whole new level, redefining the trade along the way.
But the road to the pinnacle was not without missteps. Oh no.
For your entertainment, here are some of my better ones.
Giant Snail Mounted Ballistas: Figured they'd get there eventually, right? That it'd be easy to train giant snails for some reason and they'd provide a solid, mobile base for my smaller siege engines. The fact that I stubbornly continued to pour resources into this project even past the conceptual stage shows you just how fucked up I was most of the time at this point in my career.
Dermott*1 threw me an Intervention which I narrowly survived and after he let me out of the cell some months later, I sorta had my shit together and thanked him with a pet Mammoth that he ended up naming SchnuggleTusk. He fuckin loves that thing.
True story, Black Lotus is a hell of a drug, OK?
Speaking of drugs...
"Rage" Potions: All right, I know it doesn't sound like a good idea, you know, 'Berserker-in-a-bottle', but I really thought it could be done. Like it could be a handy, pre-attack drink for my shock troops. Some sort of energy drink mixed with a few electrolytes and a chemical component that kicked those reptilian rage-centers squarely in the metaphysical dick.
Turns out this is really easy for experienced pharma-magi. The difficult bit is getting your raged up troops focused on attacking the enemy, rather than the very nearest fucker he could get his angry hands on. So after watching squad after squad of mercenary test subjects gleefully slaughter one another in unspeakable ways, I told Dermott I'm cutting the budget on the project. He nodded and a few more people were quietly butchered and we spoke no more about it. That's Lawful Evil in action, baby. Efficiency over Art.
Insect-Human Hybrids- Maybe my mistake was going with a human-cricket hybrid. Perhaps a praying mantis or some sort of beetle may have been a better choice. Possibly an ant. More likely the Arcane Assets I tasked with the job just weren't up for it, magically speaking.
Whatever the problem, the first wave of these things that hatched were worthless, writhing abominations that made a deafening noise which was equal parts mutant-baby shrieking and mutant-cricket chirping.
I made it maybe thirty seconds before I signaled Dermott to Shut It The Fuck Down. Meaning of course to murder everything involved, including the Wizards and burn everything that remained until it was nothing but a scab on the skin of the land.
Then we had dinner. Mutton if I recall correctly but honestly it could've been Halfling for all I know. I don't ask many questions if it tastes good and the mead is flowing.
Skyr-Minge: The leader of a now extinct race of Mountain Giants whose former lands bordered my Empire back in the early days. This was the stage in my career where I was the new upstart, I was the New Kid who had been held back several years, was bigger than everyone else and who was throwing his weight around. I was stealing lunch money, claiming whole tables and everyone else was getting tired of it. And as usually happens, an Alliance formed against me.
So everyone around me just said 'fuck it' and started attacking my forces relentlessly, slashing supply lines, hitting weak points and just generally being a giant collective pain in my ass. At this time the only compass point I wasn't being counter attacked on was the North east, where Skyr-Minge loosely ruled over fractious clans of dumbfuck Mountain Giants.
I'd had a non aggression pact with Skyr-Minge and was in a position where I could easily deal with the troubles on my borders if I felt I didn't have to worry about the self styled 'King of the Mountain Giants' keeping his word.
Fortunately for me I didn't trust him and as you can guess he betrayed the Pact at the point he'd thought it would be most beneficial for him. He was wrong. About everything. And now he and his folk are just a sad offshoot of the Giant species that has joined the fossil record.
My mistake here was merely distrusting him enough to allocate enough resources to avert disaster in a worst case scenario. Instead I should've automatically assumed he was gonna try and fuck me and set an outright trap for him, making my life SO much easier.
Meh. Judgement calls, they can't always be right. The silver lining in all of this is that after I hunted down the last Mountain Giant, the local Yeti population were quite thankful because unsurprisingly, Mountain Giants are huge assholes. This newfound association has led to some very useful winter weather troops as well as a wealth of mineral and ore mines that the Giants were too stupid to exploit and the Yetis' don't care about.
Fuckin score...
The Rumpus Squad: This was my secret collection of absolute homicidal maniacs. Twisted creatures so depraved that I had to deploy them clandestinely lest I sully the reputation of Lawful Evil and stray into Neutral or Chaotic-Evil territory. Even as a Despot that enjoys a bit of inventive cruelty and is no stranger to Overtures of Suffering, I eventually stopped reading the details of their reports because they were so disturbingly unnecessary and excessive. After what they did to one poor city's puppy population, my PR department was like "Rumpus Squad gotta go!".
So I sent a griffon to Dermott with a message that read, "It's Nap Time", and a couple dozen gruesome executions later, it was all a memory that we blamed on local orcs.
Plausible deniability isn't that easy to spell but it's certainly worth knowing.
And with that, would-be Grim Lords, I bid you good evening.
-Lord Hurderoth
His May Be Word Law
*1 Dermott Krullbjorn, my steadfast Number Two. Cmon, don't you even read this thing?
