Rules to Rule By

2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box.

6. I will not gloat over my enemies' predicatment before killing them.

7. When the rebel leader challenges me to fight one-on-one and asks, "Or are you afraid without your armies to back you up?" My reply will be, "No, just sensible."

8. When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him.

9. After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks' time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

10. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled "Danger: Do Not Push".

11. I will not order my trusted lieutenant to kill the infant who is destined to overthrow me-I'll do it myself.

12. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum-a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.

13. I will be secure in my superiority. Therefore, I will feel no need to prove it by leaving clues in the form of riddles or leaving my weaker enemies alive to show they pose no threat.

14. I will not waste time making my enemy's death look like an accident-I'm not accountable to anyone and my other enemies wouldn't believe it.

15. I will make it clear that I do know the meaning of the word "mercy"; I simply choose not show them any.

16. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

17. All slain enemies will be cremated, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.

18. My undercover agents will not have tattoos identifying them as members of my organization, nor will they be required to wear military boots or adhere to any other dress codes.

19. The hero is not entitled to a last kiss, a last cigarette, or any other form of last request.

20. I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

21. I will design all doomsday machines myself. If I must hire a mad scientist to assist me, I will make sure that he is sufficiently twisted to never regret his evil ways and seek to undo the damage he's caused.

22. I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."

23. When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.

24. I will not have a son. Although his laughably under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail, it would provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point in time.

25. I will not have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero's rugged countenance and she'd betray her own father.

26. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it's too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.

27. I will hire a talented fashion designer to create original uniforms for my legions of terror, as opposed to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi stormtroopers, Roman footsoldiers, or savage Mongol hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my troops to have a more positive mind-set.

28. No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.

29. I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train my troops in their use. That way-even if the heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or render the standard-issue energy weapons useless-my troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages armed with spears and rocks.

30. I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

31. No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructable except for one small and virtually inaccessible vulnerable spot.

32. If I am engaged in a duel to the death with the hero and I am fortunate enough to knock the weapon out of his hand, I will graciously allow him to retrieve it. This is not from a sense of fair play; rather, he will be so startled and confused that I will easily be able to dispatch him.

33. No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is probably someone just as attractive who is not desperate to kill me. Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my bedchamber.

34. If I happen to have the resistance leader nearby, I will not let him live in the spirit of diplomacy. I will wait for him to go to sleep, then order a bunch of soldiers with really big guns to not leave anything bigger than an amoeba on the site where his tent used to be.

35. Instead of performing an intricate ceremony to exile the infant that will overthrow me into the Nth dimension, I will simply shoot it. It's much faster.

36. I will know the difference between real magic and sleight-of-hand, and will not allow the latter to distract me and accidentally make me exile myself to the Nth dimension.

37. When a sorceress is waving some wand at me, I will not go for the wand. I will lob an army at her and pick up the wand when they're done.

38. If one of my commanders waltzes in with a new recruit that used to work with the resistance, I will save myself a lot of trouble and kill them both.

39. I will not get involved with some all-powerful person that cannot die. Despite the appeal of power, everyone who does this seems to wind up in a bad place.

40. Heroes will not be locked in a room with some intricate trap. Heroes will be shot on the spot.

41. I will not try to become a god. Everyone who does seems to wind up getting tortured by that god for all eternity, and while I do enjoy dispensing torture, I have little intention of receiving it.

42. I will never have someone build a device I cannot use and service myself.

43. I will remember that excessive force is mean. However, it is also practical, and will be used as much as possible.

44. I will respect and compliment my most effective warrirors, not use them as punching bags.

45. I am quite willing to kill in a paranoid and indiscriminate method if it is useful at the time.

46. If one of my warriors has important information and is sentenced to death, I will not ignore his information and kill him. I will listen to his information and then kill him.

47. Among other things, I will be smart enough to realize that, sooner or later, my enemies will call my bluffs. Therefore, I will not make any threats I cannot actually carry out.

48. In addition to not trying to become a god, I will be smart enough to realize that some unholy god of death and destruction will not be so kind as to let my forces off because we set him free. Therefore, my forces will worship deities that are powerful, evil, and quite happily sitting far away from me.

49. Leather will have no place in the outfits for my leigons of doom.

50. In the middle of a duel with the rebel hero, I will tell him that I am his parent. This is most likely not true, but it will shock him so deeply that cleaving off his head will be a simple matter.

51. The entrance to my chambers will not be large, obvious double doors at the end of a long, winding staircase. It will be a small, modest door, which the heroes will ignore in the romantic idea of charging up the spiral staircase to batter down the double doors.

52. My barracks, on the other hand, will be large, obvious double doors at the end of a long, winding staircase, situated above my chambers. The heroes will be expecting to find me, and their screams of shock will be extremely entertaining.

53. I will not build robotic copies of the heroes. They always lose because they are not real, and they just waste time. Instead, I will build robotic copies of Aliens. They will also lose, but at least Aliens take out a few people beforehand.

54. I will learn to say "yes" and "no" as they were meant to be pronounced.

55. I will not speak with a German, Russian, or any other traditionally "evil" accent. I will speak standard american english, or whatever other dialect I happen to be accustomed to.

56. I feel no need to savor the moment before I kill my enemies. I will, instead, savor the sound of a sharp object ramming through their skull.

57. I am willing to work with the heroes to save the world from destruction if I need to. And afterwards, I will kill them all and thank them for their help.