Additional Evil Overlord List Cellblock D

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • When drafting a duty schedule for my minions, I shall arrange their shifts so they'll get plenty of rest. In particular, I want my security forces to be fresh and alert should the hero or any other troublemakers show up at the gates.
  • I will have the hero killed in such a way that a body will be left behind as proof that he's dead. As such, vaporizing him, incinerating him, breaking him apart into individual molecules, etc., are not acceptable ways to kill the hero unless something that can be definitively identified as the dead hero can be left behind—kill or be killed situations notwithstanding, of course.
    • Once he's dead, I will have the body dissolved in acid. I will then consider the POSSIBILITY that he might really be dead.
  • I will make sure I have a full understanding of how my universe operates. For example, if a fall from any height can be rendered non-lethal by certain illogical circumstances, I will take advantage of that. I will keep the potential for inconsistencies (i. e. the hero survives a 10,000-foot fall into the sea and everyone else is as good as dead) in mind, though, and avoid the risk if I have any reason to believe my situation is an exception to my universe's illogical rules.
  • I will appoint someone to be the guy that plays the leader of my empire while I take on the role of the mayor of a far away town that sits on the very edge of the empire. If the hero ever shows up, I'll be as nice as possible to him, but say there's little I can actually do against the evil empire. Should my decoy be defeated, I WON'T make a sudden appearance as the REAL leader. I'll just redo the plan while staying undercover (why should I break cover when the hero has probably put me at the bottom of the "Potential Leaders of the Evil Empire" list, below their own family members and an NPC who tells them about a local legend?).
  • As supreme ruler of my empire, it is my prerogative to make whatever laws I deem fit. Nevertheless, I will refrain from making laws that are entirely arbitrary, nonsensical, and/or impossible to enforce without diverting manpower, funding, and other resources away from areas of far more pressing concern.
  • By nature of being the bad guy, there is a good chance my Evil Plan will fail no matter how well I prepare. This being the case, I will make sure I will always have an opportunity to switch to an honest life just in case I ever decide that being evil isn't worth the trouble.
  • If I am, in my rise to power, engaging in some illegal activity, all present will be instructed to not use names. There's no point to it. If those I am working with find it absolutely impossible to work without some way to refer to each individual, I will randomly assign them names from a list of words that I create. There is no point in being Thundara, Lord of the Dance, when Dance is so much easier in practice. And though they will, of course, run drills while using these names, all drills will be done in full disguise.
  • My palace guards will have regularly scheduled times when they must report in to the main security office via radio or intercom, even if it's just to report "situation normal". If any guard fails to check in at any of his appointed times, whoever's on duty in the security office is to initiate a full-scale alert on the assumption that said guard was killed or incapacitated by an intruder, and that there's now a security breach in progress. If it's found thereafter that the guard in question failed to check in because he abandoned his post or was preoccupied with anything he's not supposed to be doing while on watch, he's in deep shit.
    • All guard patrols will always be in sight of AT LEAST one other guard patrol. Instead of positioning two guys at the main gate and that's it. Additionally, all guards will operate in groups of at least six, since one or two can be taken quietly before raising the alarm by even the most callow and inexperienced of heroes.
    • it goes without saying that the guy in the security office must answer back a password only known to my guards
  • Any items that the hero needs to obtain will not be in the possession of my most annoying-to-defeat elites, but in the possession of my impossible-to-defeat privates.
    • Why are my elites weaker than my mooks, exactly? I will promote the mooks in this situation.
  • If I attempt to shut down a machine that's "malfunctioning" and my scientific adviser warns me that it has become sentient, I'll listen and respond accordingly. If it is indeed sentient, I'll treat it as a person who can be negotiated or emotionally manipulated with.
  • Even if the hero currently lacks a power, I will factor into my battle plans the possibility that he might suddenly obtain it and turn the tide of the fight. Heroes have an annoying tendency to do that when all seems lost.
  • I will have the cost of all new weapons projects analyzed before even a prototype is built. This way, if the planned weapon is determined to be too expensive to mass-produce, the hero won't have a prototype to steal. Also, if the weapon is too expensive, even the schematics presented to me will be destroyed—I will personally oversee their destruction; leaving the task to someone else almost guarantees that they'll put it off and inadvertently allow the hero to steal the plans and reverse-engineer the weapon.
  • My agents, operatives, and minions will only be permitted to utilize paper-thin disguises in specific circumstances. These include training observers for the level of sophistication expected from garden-variety heroes, operations where the agent is meant to be identified, and entertainment. Anyone caught issuing, being issued, wearing, or developing a Paper-Thin Disguise without the above excuses will be fired. Preferably from a howitzer. All agents who are meant to succeed will be issued in-depth covers, be trained with their covers to prevent slips, and even receive plastic surgery or prosthetic alterations if their appearance is too well-known.
  • It is possible that, by nature of being the Evil Overlord, my people will hate me no matter what I do. In that case, I will forget about being a villain with good PR and instead focus on aspects of my plan that are unaffected by how much my people hate me.
  • I will not dispose of incompetent minions by sending them into space without a suit, forcing them to walk overboard, or any similar method. Such things carry a chance of the fool surviving long enough to be picked up by the hero, in which case my ex-minion will invariably divulge important information to the hero and/or side with him and suddenly become competent. The same policy holds true with traitors and anyone else I want to get rid of. Instead, I will just have them shot, beheaded, or disposed of in a similar manner that guarantees they will not end up helping the hero.
  • If I decide to place a tracking device on a prisoner and then let him/her escape (for example, if I'm trying to locate that annoying rebel base that the prisoner won't tell me the location of), the device will be in the form of a nanobot hidden in the prisoner's food. The bot will stay within the prisoner's body. If possible, the nanobot will attach itself to the prisoner's nervous system and transmit a full sensory feed rather than just the now-escaped prisoner's location. In fact, just in case the prisoner accidentally gets the nanobot out through sheer luck, multiple nanobots will be hidden in the prisoner's food.
  • All vehicles, uniforms, weapons, etc., will have tracking devices and recording devices hidden on them. This will allow me to keep an eye on my underlings, just in case someone's plotting my demise and/or shirking their duties. In addition, it will help me locate anything the hero steals when and if he infiltrates one of my bases and survives.
    • All vehicles used by my forces shall have devices installed in them that allow me to remotely shut off their engines if they're stolen. Said devices shall be on par or better designed than those used by real world police departments in their bait cars.
  • If the one item capable of destroying me can only be used once, I will not trick the hero into wasting it unless: 1) absolutely nothing (that means NOTHING, not "only some extremely unlikely set of circumstances") can be done to make it usable again, 2) the item's use is a component of my plan, or 3) the thing takes so long to reload, even with the aid of some special incantation, item, or other action, that the hero will be dead and the item's immediate threat to me neutralized (by means of the item's destruction, if possible) before he can use it again.
  • I will know the name of everyone among my personal guards. People I address as "guard" tend not to live that long. The same holds true for anyone else who answers directly to me.
  • Any robots or golems I construct will be programmed with knowledge of all commonly used metaphors and idioms in both my native language and whatever village/country/planet I need to infiltrate. Especially if I live in a universe that runs on Rule of Funny.
  • If my computer is intelligent enough to argue with the hero, I will have a team of computer programmers make sure that it is impervious to any Logic Bombs. In the case that the computer becomes intelligent enough to out-argue me, I will design it so that it will shut down when I press a remote device that I carry with me at all times.
    • Taking this into account, I will ALSO have my programmers block out all knowledge of the emergency shutdown device. It cannot track its signal, it cannot visually identify it, and if it hears about it, it is treated as if it was the remote control to my new trapdoor.
  • I will learn all possible methods that could be used to revive the dead hero (or clone him, or transfer his consciousness into another vessel, etc.) and take the necessary measures to ensure no one pulls off such procedures. I will keep him dead and not even consider reviving him in evil form; he would either try to overthrow me, return to the side of good, or make one of his comrades the unofficial new hero by being slain by said ally in a dramatic and tragic fight.
  • I will not use a Shrink Ray. Those things are so last generation. But if that is what I am stuck with for an ultimate weapon, I will show restraint in its use. Shrinking the hero down to three inches high and holding him or her in my hand may be cathartic, but after the inevitable escape, recapture will be nigh impossible, and there are so many ways of turning being that small into an advantage it isn't even funny.
    • Rather, I will consider the advantages of shrinking the hero to a height of three feet. This will still take roughly seven-eighths of the fight out of my enemy (thank you, Square-Cube Law), which should be more than enough, barring superpowers. Additionally, If my five-year-old advisor is a boy, he will appreciate having someone slightly smaller than himself to torment, and further, giving my foe a new wardrobe consisting of said advisor’s outgrown clothing may be even more amusing in the long run.
  • I will never design, build, nor use any contraption—be it magical, technological, or some mingling of the two—that uses a forsaken child as a power source or key component, that sort of thing never ends well.
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