As a rule of thumb, I've always shied away from creating Titano-Monsters no matter how trendy they become. The current fad is 'The Bigger, The Better' in terms of hot monsterness, but my advice is ignore the prestige.

  Take it from a Dark Lord who's been there, creating MASSIVE, ANGRY monsters to wreak havoc on your enemy is every bit as fucking tangy and arousing as you think it's going to be and then some. One might even say it's the ultimate expression of Dark Lordery, sending mountain sized abominations unto you deserving foe.


  Preferably from a very safe distance.


  But let me tell you there are some very serious drawbacks to super sizing a monster, not the least among them is the devastation they can wreak on your own forces in the event they go all panic-frenzy. Remember that your army's average foot soldier can be turned into just as creamy a paste as your Giant Status-Monster turns the enemy regulars into.


  If you've done your homework, the Enormous Creature you're employing won't be much smarter than a dog and can't reliably be expected to differentiate one group of tiny screaming things from another. Start creating/breeding intelligent Titano Monsters and you're just asking for trouble...





  So let's break this down, the pros and cons of Giant Monstering:



PROS:


1) Destructo-Porn: As a Dark Lord there really isn't anything much more gratifying than to witness a hideous abomination you've brought into being, wading through your enemy's city whose magnificent towers and edifices only reach to your Titano-Beast's genitals as is crisscrosses a path of utter destruction throughout that once great metropolis. If you get your Illusionists to record it, you can replay it on a big screen at your orgies.


2) Motivatin Da Troops: In general having a Titano Monster to unleash upon your foe vastly boosts the morale of you troops, which if you're any good at your job should already be high. Nothing soothes and encourages your average foot fodder more than some towering, bestial monstrosity lurching ahead of them toward a fortified position. The more seasoned among them know of course that the situation will get ugly if the thing takes too much resistance and goes all feral again. If you serve long enough on these battlefields, it'll probably happen.


3) Implied Threat: No one wants to have to try to stop a 500 foot tall, enraged anything from smashing their city walls and knocking a bunch of architecture down. So if you happen to have a 500 foot tall something that can kick through city walls like sandcastles and that seems to enjoy stomping on buildings for whatever reason, then you have what's known as a strong bargaining position.


(see also: "Say that's a nice city ya got dere. Be a shame if a Giant Monster stomped all over it.")


4) Status: Sure you've got all kinds of Infantry, some nifty Calvary units, a few flying buggers and a solid core of Warmagi. You've made a name for yourself in the Dark Lording/Evil Emperoring circles. Lesser D-bags are legitimately and rightfully terrified of you, as they should be. Congrats!

  But do you have that towering, five hundred plus foot tall goliath beast-thingy that your closest rivals don't? 

  Or does your Arch-Rival have a larger Giganto-Critter than you, not matter what scale it's on?

  In those cases you've lost the Status battle. And while Status may be fleeting and doesn't in and of itself win wars, once you've clawed, kicked and burned your way to the top of the Dark Lord heap, Status becomes all the more important. A good Malevolent Tyrant will always seek to outdo themself, never resting on their laurels even if they just strangled a hundred people with them.




Cons: 



1) Feeding The Damn Thing: Whether it's meat, souls, raw magical energy or what have you, a Titano Monster is going to eat a metric fuckton of it and then some. No matter how much you think it's going to consume, it's best to figure on adding another zero to that total. You simply can't comprehend how much of anything a creature that size requires to continue existing. It's truly staggering.

  I can speak from experience as once, in my earlier days I had my Blood Science Magi create me a Balrog-Dragon hybrid critter which in time grew to be just over 300 feet tall. At it's peak mass it required about one hundred cows a day to keep it going. That roughly equals 90-100 tons of meat a day. 

  Picture a huge valley just teeming with cattle. Cows as far as the eye can see, grazing, mooing, fucking, shitting all over the place, happy as cows can be. Then picture two weeks later and that valley is empty because I fed the entire herd to my Ridiculously Massive Skull-Dragon-Wingy-Thing.

  Do you know how longs it takes to grow a herd of cattle 20,000 strong? Quite a while....

  Eventually I had to have it destroyed at great expense. It's not like you can just set it free, yell "Go Away" at it and expect it to just walk away sadly, head down. Nope, it's gonna fight you and you'd best have your adult Dark Lord pants on that day....



2) Getting Rid Of It: As aforementioned, unless it's magical and can just be banished back from whence it came, your options are limited. You can, of course, continue to employ it and keep it fed at ruinous expense just for the undeniable pleasure of watching it do it's thing, You're a Dark Lord, it's an option.

  But suppose for a moment that you want your empire to flourish and not just become a milking cow for your Destructo-Porn addiction. If the Damn Thing can't be banished back to another plane, what's your next move?

  Trying to starve it is a super bad idea. Expecting it to walk away like a Harry and the Henderson's sequel is equally implausible. So you're basically left with terminating it. Killing the big, dumb thing. 

  Don't feel bad about it, you're evil after all. Just hope you have the metaphorical gun big enough to do the job, tough guy.

3) Would it survive a Cost/Benefit analysis? Outside of generating Destructo-Porn, which is awesome, is there anything your Titano Monster accomplishes for you that a squad of Giant Vole Mounted Dwarven Sappers couldn't, albeit in far less spectacular fashion? To be honest, not really. But to continue being honest, it's difficult to get a good fap going to stuff happening underground that you can't see. So there's that.



  In the end, no matter how popular Kaijus', Titans' and other assorted Gigundus Aberrations' are at the moment, they're just a Dark Lording fad that will soon run it's course. Don't be fooled in buying the RV of monsters because they're currently trendy, they depreciate faster than an Orc tavern wench.



 Yours in Oppression With Compassion
-Lord Hurderoth



Law His Word Be
  

Four vignettes about Dragons (kinda...). Or, what the fantasy books don't tell you aboot the Greet, Scaaaley Boostards.

 

  Believe it or not, dragons are a lot like humans. Some are smarter than others, some are meaner than others. Some are more greedy and others more altruistic. Some of them are even nice, the kind of creature who remembers your birthday, and asks after your offspring's health whenever your paths happen to cross.

  There's a lingering misnomer that all dragons look alike, which couldn't be further from the truth and is only truly embraced by hardcore speciests. Their colors, their scale patterns, their Horn Arrays and Talon Prints are all unique. Every Dragon is special, even if they're not anything to write home about.

 They're still a dragon, you jaded fuck.

  The myth that all dragons are hyper intelligent, ultra cunning beasts is mostly just that, a myth. Oh sure they're around, the evil genius ones, but the legend surrounding their intellect has been hyperbolized. What they really have, in spades, is previous experience dealing with humans.

  Which is to say that although we humans, as a species, like to glorify our kind and set ourselves on some sort of philosophical pedestal (since we invented philosophy AND pedestals), the truth of the matter is our basic natures haven't changed all that much over the entirety of our history.

  The trappings of civilization tend to blunt and mask our baser tendencies, but strip away culture and society, food and safety, and watch how savage we can get. 

  And how quickly.

  And since we exhibit the same flaws over and over again through the ages, even a dragon of moderate intellect can figure us out after five or so (of our) generations. We're just not as great as we picture ourselves, otherwise we'd have probably wiped out Dragonkind by now. 


   Yet only the stupidest of dragons doesn't understand this and regularly use it to bamboozle and cheat our petty and venal asses.




  Right. Now that's out of the way...


  

  I've had, in my career as a Dark Lord, quite a few interactions with Dragons.


  I've fought them, killed them, employed them, referred them, evaluated them, worked for them, put a price on their heads, heeded their warnings, ignored them, sheltered them, abetted them, opposed them and just about married one of my cousins to one of them. 


  In all that time and with all those interactions, I have been outwitted by one, outplayed by two and regularly drink with another three.


  So here, in no particular order are four tiny stories (vignettes) about Dragons (mostly) from the perspective of an Lawful Evil DL.

1) I regularly employ a Stunt Dragon. I'm not ashamed to admit it because I'm Evil.


   If I were one of those Good sorta types hiring the same lizard for a similar gig, I'd be embarrassed because it's deceptive and underhanded and whatever happy-ass Gods I served probably wouldn't tolerate me lying about an evil Dragon being vanquished to make money.

  Most of you outside the Dark Lording industry probably don't know what a Stunt Dragon is. It's not in any or the Manuals, Tomes or Folios, no matter how rare or unpublished they may be. It's a highly specialized subspecies of dragonkind that hires itself out to up and coming Heroes, Adventure Coordinators, Crooked Dragon Hunt Guides as well as the odd Dark Lord with a complex and multi-faceted public relations agenda.

  His name is, believe it or not, Devastay-Shawn. And he's a professional Stunt Dragon with an impressive natural horn mullet. For a handsome sum, he'll threaten a certain region, burn down the odd village or two for the look of the thing and generally be a feared nuisance until a convenient Hero (wink, wink) shows up to slay him, to much local applause and reward.


  His glamours can make him look like any dragon, and contrary to the average human perspective, all dragons DO NOT look alike. That's Speciest thought right there. Reprehensible.

  It became his business model after he'd realized humans weren't going away any time soon and that they frequently seemed to have a lot of money. Faking the death of either himself or his local equivalent or whatever role he'd been contracted to portray. The service isn't cheap but the payoff to the conniving Hero/Politician/Lawspeaker/Bad Guy, etc etc is often immense. 

  A Pied Piper Scheme on an enterprise scale, with the metaphorical 'rats' calling the shots.

  Devastay-Shawn is a fucking genius.

2) Laughtrax was the first dragon I ever contracted with and the only reason he didn't kill me during our association was because I amused him. It's the sole reason I survived our business dealings together.

  I'm handy with the one liners and Laughtrax had a soft spot for comedians. Ergo, he incinerated a few mid sized cities for me and I'd rewarded him with several 3 minute sets of speciest jokes about dragonkind and dragon-culture in general. Fresh material per city burned, of course.

  He ate it up.

  We're still on amicable terms to this day and he's a regular follower of this blog.


3) Matti T is a one of a kind Hydra-Dragon crossbreed with five heads all boasting their own unique breath weapon. She's got a thousand Hit Points or something ridiculous like that and the short of it is you and your party of haughty, photogenic Adventurers are never, ever going to defeat her.

 It all comes down to:

A) How many of you she's been paid to let live, contractually.

B) How many of you she decides to spare, if she decides to honor the contract.

C) How many of you have enough coin or clout to buy your way out of incineration, via me, Her employer....?

  

  4) There was once, about forty or so years ago, a rival Dark Lord I had to go toe-to-toe with, for dominance of the central area of my projected Empire. His name was Larry Fossman, he styled himself the 'Dragon Lord of The Central Plains'

  I whupped his monkey-ass and decided to spare him because I smelled the subservience wafting off him.

  He absolutely DID NOT want to run the Big Show and was balls-ass happy to be granted the opportunity to manage whatever I saw fit to allow him. Which at that point was The Canyon of the Arachnid King, my first destination to really take off. 

  Larry started his way at the bottom, which was not being killed outright, and made his way up through the corporate chain of demise. He settled into the most ambitious niche he figured he could attain while maintaining a low profile. 

  Over the years Larry has proven himself unfailingly reliable in whatever role I've put him in. He currently manages my 2nd highest grossing Adventure Destination, The Hateful Mountain Keep Of The Dragon Emperor.

  That destination consistently wastes some fairly high level hitters. Larry's riddles are both arbitrary AND lethal. He's a mastermind at doublespeak.


  That's what you get this lesson, non-paying scum.

  Tune in next time when I tell you how to take down a fortified city using only stuff I'm not going to tell you about here.


  You know you like it.

  -Lord Hurderoth

His May Word Law Is