"…They, in the flurry of their whacking fists, did not like the doubts my talk inspired. It made them waver from the commitment already determined by all who would manage to reach the highest point of our nation’s journey.

You see, Jazeer, the path up high—said messages travelling down the line—was blocked at the end by another obstacle, a deep ravine. Into that, in the manner our honoured ancestors, we would be offering our bodies, creating through our corpses the next bridge onwards. For six thousand years, this latest segment had been in the works. However, its completion was nearing, and, by the time we reached it, we might be amongst the lucky pioneers to amble across.

Either way, as the ever-loyal Tasheezi, we accepted. Onwards and up, we continued to drag ourselves, eating our brothers as they fell..."

*

On The Execution of Friends and Family

The Left Hand Kings are most remembered for slaughtering people in battle. However, lest we forget the entire picture of their magnificence, just as vital to their responsibilities was the slaughter of their own people. Judicial homicide - this is its own fascinating sub-field of tyrannical mass murder, and one that at least merits a cursory treatment for any of you learning this left-handed art and wishing to follow its odd developments.

Consequently, this topic, judicial homicide, will be lightly addressed in today's brief instructional pamphlet. For the purposes of illustration throughout, we'll be alternating between examples from both The Left Hand Kings and Saana's most infamous and sorely-missed smiter of the people, The Tyrant. Although many specific methods of judicial homicide could be covered, not wanting to get carried away as some tyrants are prone to, it should suffice to examine a single prominent example of judicial homicide, with it being understood that the core principles apply to the rest of any judicial homicide you might implement in your own regime.

Consider the kin execution.

The additional murder of family merely related to the guilty criminal - this advanced technique of judicial homicide is probably one of the more contentious methods in the autocratic arsenal. The Left Hand Kings, being mass murderers, obviously practised it. The Tyrant of Saana, as already admitted amongst his many transgressions against a videogame humanity, had as well - although, for what it was worth, with more restraint, reserving the punishment for high-level assassinations and corruption within his own organisation. Some critics oppose kin executions outright due to the inherent ethical issues of collective punishment and refute their efficacy. As a tyrant, of course, you should spit upon this critic, individual 'rights' being an anachronism with no place in a feudal system.

As for the real meat of that critique, rest your conscience assured, killing people's families absolutely works. On the one hand, you drastically up the deterrent factor, countless men being willing to risk their own lives against your regime but far fewer their kids' lives. On the other hand, you promote greater internal policing amongst your subjects, who'll punish their own members to avoid familial extinction.

Going beyond both these lesser rationales, at the highest tier of quantum judicial homicide—as achieved by pioneer of tyranny, Joseph Stalin, in the other judicial homicide sub-domain of colleague executions—kin executions also eliminate any affiliates of the criminal who were probabilistically harbouring similar sentiments. If anyone calls you a paranoid maniac, as they did our quantum predecessor, spit upon their ignorance. They're just not able to comprehend the precarity and entanglements of your position. You, an advanced tyrant, can concede, quite generously and happily, that this suspicious individual you're executing might not be hostile, but you also know that the minor risk when averaged across your vast enemies accumulates to a certainty that at least one of them is guilty and therefore, q.e.d, all of these executions are justified.

Kin executions are simply smart policy. The only guilt you should feel is not having instituted them earlier and leaving your regime in danger.

Now, having decided to kill the friends and families of criminals, the question next falls to the practical execution of these executions, which requires a tyrant to navigate a number of tricky and indefinite variables.

Which extra family members do you execute?

The most obvious problem.

Descendants first, naturally, those being the strongest deterrents. Since the largest criminal demographic is young and unmarried men without children, you should also execute siblings, parents, and any non-family known to be close friends. How you expand further will depend on the degree of the crime. There can be cultural considerations as well. In matriarchal societies, for one example, uncles tend to be pseudo-father figures, so you might want to kill them, too, or, in reverse of the guilt by kin formula, their nephews and nieces.

Drawing upon inspiration from our Left Hand Kings, they, erring on the side of execution, added up to fourth-degree relatives. This practice is not recommended unless you're by far the most powerful individual in your nation and immune to even group assassination.

How should you execute the family?

A conundrum of multiple conundrums. Simultaneously? Staggered? The actual criminal first or last? Some in public; some in private? With the same execution means?

Here, both our models confer valuable lessons.

The Tyrant of Saana, blending his odd regime of oppression and compassion, prefers a two-part differentiation, with a primary and a secondary execution means. The first means, something local and torturous, is given to the perpetrator in order to make a more graphic and deterring example of their execution beyond the execution of their family. The second means, for the family and other affiliates, is a quick-acting poison. In optimal circumstances, he aims for a clean, synchronised family kill, saving the primary means for himself while his minions serve the wife and kids. It's debatable whether any improvement to public image is gained from this two-toned execution palette, but the juxtaposition inarguably provides a simple but tasteful contrast.

The Left Hand Kings, meanwhile, in a way some might judge excessive and tacky, do gruesome medley executions, flaunting various novel executions across the family. You might guess that the one-man approach necessitates uniform staggering, but it's entirely possible to circumvent this issue by stacking the family members, and, once one has learned this advanced technique, it unlocks a whole panoply of creative execution variations.

Which one is best for your regime only you can decide. The choice of these or others largely depends on the context, goal, and aesthetics of brutalisation. Overall, don't get attached to any one kin execution method and try to think wholistic.

Who gets amnesty?

A tyrant might want to ignore this completely and implement a uniform policy of everybody related gets executed, but you'd be strongly cautioned against doing so.

Even in conservative kin executions strategies, when limiting yourself to direct descendants, there can still, surprisingly, be regime-ending pitfalls. Nobles of advanced age, for but one example, can have hundreds of great-grandchildren, and many of these will be wed into dynasties you're allied with. By sticking too close to your first plan to kill these multiplying offspring, you're liable to earn your allies' frustration and defection, requiring you to execute them and their direct descendants in a never-ending spread.

With no definite ruleset, we should therefore look to The Tyrant of Saana, who favours a loose, case-by-case assessment. In a recent incident of potential kin execution with a corrupt Senior Director of a branch in Suchi, he exempted the criminal's children and spouse and even put them into his protective services in exchange for information from the father that offered casus belli against an adversarial empire. This was an intelligent trade. If the bribe's high enough, certainly, do not be afraid to compromise, do strategically let a couple members of the family slip the noose.

What, you might question yourself, if this flexibility undermines your authority? Spit upon the notion. A small amount of flexibility actually amplifies your authority. In seeing you actively deliberate, your subjects will realise that you're watching more closely. Additionally, by flagrantly breaking your own rules, you show that your legal codes are just a subordinate, abstract device for generalising your higher rule of force.

How to collect the family?

The enumeration of these factors could continue to infinity. Spitting upon infinity, we'll conclude with a magnifying glass upon a tyrant favourite of kin executions and perhaps the most neglected in the present age, the collection process.

In bagging so many people and bringing them together for an execution, you have to balance the pragmatic issues of multiple capture with the higher possibilities of public statement. Collecting the family doesn't have to simply be a dull means to transport them to the execution grounds. Through how you manage the affair, through staging, through cast, you can also tell a story and exhibit your personal flair.

Here, a side-by-side comparison of The Tyrant of Saana's preferred routine and The Left Hand Kings could be highly educative.

For Saana's Tyrant, in the middle of an ordinary day, wheresoever each member has dispersed, at their job, at a lunch, his agents pop up and request their immediate accompaniment to the nearest euphemistically-titled 'Trading Post'. No further explanation is given, nor needed, the lack of explanation itself being the explanation, plus the guards, plus the others being rounded up simultaneously, often within view of each other. Some will fight. Most, as a pleasant side benefit from the ambiguity of his aforementioned flexibility, will comply. A few days or weeks later, after legal investigations, appeals, snitching, and whatnot, the family reappears in public or it doesn't.

The Left Hand King, in contrast, limited by manpower and more massacre-oriented in his judicial homicides, merges collection and execution into one brutal step. He waits for a big event where multiple family members have gathered, like a coming-of-age ceremony, a wedding, a funeral. Then, suddenly, The Left Hand King's amongst them, executing. Any targets who escape or skip, he hunts down later. From town to town, he stalks after them, city to city, forever. Notices go out denouncing the targets, and anyone caught harbouring one is, of course, executed, too.

Through these dissimilar approaches, we see emphasised in different proportions the general qualities that make an effective autocrat.

The Tyrant's method of family bagging, understated and chic, complements the shadowy atmosphere of his regime. His agents' arrests in mundane occasions serves to make invisible his oppression through normalisation into the daily context. As for the agents' refusal to declare their plans overtly, this, coupled with the superficially-voluntary compliance of the arrestees, generates an impression of a power higher than all resistance and question.

The Left Hand King's method, abrupt and catastrophic, compensates for his lack of numbers through the efficiency of exaggerated, morbid spectacle. The staging of executions at public events increases the eye-witness testimony, along with hijacking the excitement of the festivities and transposing it into terror. The subsequent one-man hunt, a masterful addition, stretches the execution longitudinally, creating a topical drama for nobles to gossip and quiver over as they track the ongoing flights of the fugitives.

Each method meanwhile manages to demonstrate the autocrat's essential psychological tool of his ambiguous omnipresence. The Left Hand King does so through his abrupt and unstoppable manifestation, The Tyrant through the preternatural coordination of his arresting agents.

In that last duality, we'll take what will be today's concluding and, perhaps, most important lesson. Just as there are endless ways to achieve the same fundamental goal of executing a criminal's family, there are also endless ways to maintain the authority of your autocratic regime. What's most essential in tyranny is not the specific choices you make, many of which will be wrong, but that you're earnestly making choices and always striving towards that highest goal of absolute rule.

And let us wrap up there. To both The Tyrant and The Left Hand Kings, for their refinement of the art, we'll finish with an applause. Next time a civilian calls your methods brutal, recollect, as you spit upon them, these paragons of the field and find in them inspiration for your growth and continual improvement.

*

...Although no one dared say it, we wanted to abandon the path, only terror of worse held us to it.

Along the way, we, the marching mass of cannibal children, had observed the alternative for those who doubted. On every side of the chosen route, these traitors stood, frozen dead along the paths they’d sought in pointless-made rebellion. Some had barely reached a few steps out, for, in departing from our congregation, they’d given up the warmth of neighbourly skin and the frost soon chilled them in their nakedness.

How miserable, we marchers thought. We, who perished in the group, would at least serve the national endeavour to climb this mountain, whether in the valiant architecture of the climb or as nutrition for our famished comrades. To die as these renegades was so much worse, preserved as they were for an eternity of isolation, embarrassing milestones, grotesque mementoes of the jeopardies of fear and folly…"

*

Henry—stepping momentarily away from either a sincere or ironic treatment of The Left Hand Kings and his own obviously overlapping methods of 'tyranny'—spat upon the false assumption beneath both that the discussion of any action whatsoever taken in a videogame warrants sensitivity or an attack against sensitivity. Upon all artificial morbidity, he spat.

In reality, within this game, the Left Hand Kings were just the apex of this videogame's elite-combat troop type. Their only real trait of distinction was being extreme and proficient at this elite role. The rest, an edgy game skin, could be discarded.

Elite-combat troops, for total newbies, maybe warranted some explanation, but even they were quite ordinary, a standard feature of Saana's contentious game balancing or its lack thereof.

Unlike in his duelling stadiums, balanced combat between individuals wasn't common out in Saana's uncivilised wilds, nor was it expected to be. This was, after all, not a duelling game but a massive multiplayer roleplaying game, combining subscribers who'd been grinding the instalment for a variety of lengths, who'd adventured through more or less of its world, and who were thus differentiated from each other by levels and loot. People in a fantasy universe were, objectively, not equal.

The game, instead of eliminating that inequality, chose to play around it. All sizeable organisations—player or NPC—conglomerated members from different rungs of this ever-ascending RPG ladder. In critical times of war, these members, regardless of strength, would have to rally and unite, the weakest marching alongside their superiors with a disparity equivalent to that between a tribal spearmen and a WW2 Panzer tank. In peace, meanwhile, when building the organisation, the NPC kings or guild leaders, like himself, often faced conscious choices that determined this balance. How, for example, should be distributed the finite gear and levelling resources amongst your members? One could concentrate them into a smaller number of individuals or distribute them more equally across the masses. Casual guilds favoured the latter. Top guilds, like his own, used the game's optimal army blend, the most competent individuals turned into elite troops, invested with additional martial assets and tasked with duties equal to multiple soldiers.

Now, regarding the elite roles, casuals who missed out on selection often complained about the elitist balance. Saana, they demanded, should be flattened in its power curve like other MMOs. Both themselves and hardcore players should be capped at the same level with access to roughly equal gear. The game, to these fair requests, replied with a glob of spit and a no. Roam anywhere, Saana answered, fight anyone or anything you want, but accept the consequences.

Still, people, casuals and hardcore alike, hadn't quit, Saana annihilating its industry competitors. The truth casuals didn’t want to admit was that this videogame inequality thrilled. It heightened the heights and lowered the lows. A player, subjected to a larger range of strength, felt more powerfully their station in this world and the ressentiment to raise themselves until they could spit back. The reward for the grind was becoming Achilles, a warrior from the epics who smote dozens of identity-less soldiers with each stab of the spear. In the meantime, being trash wasn't so bad. While you served amongst the ranks of spit-smeared no-names—as most gamers numerically would always be—there was a funky solidarity in the collective insignificance, in adding your dismembered limbs to the pile that eventually suffocated the human titans. Exempting extreme examples like these Left Hands jacked to hell on a sixth of an empire's resources, you could kill most elite troops through overwhelming numbers, could shave their levels, could strip their gear for yourself.

Henry, from a commander’s perspective, had also loved Saana's unique combat disparities. Mixed army compositions enhanced the dynamism of the game’s wars. Through a blend of simplifications and complexifications, they expanded the strategic possibilities far beyond that of any real-world medieval conflicts. It’d often been through his elite troops, micro-managed to augment traditional unit tactics, that he’d expressed his own art and genius.

For players, this had been tons of fun and nothing—beyond the minor complaints of spit-deserving casuals and NPCs—but fun.

Tangentially, this had been the big joke behind the '1vMany', the new type of 'elevated duel' 'invented' by his sage self and demented by the hobo who'd managed to snipe him. Henry'd invented nothing. Elite lopsided fighting was how his talented duelling peers should have been playing, and their chosen side-hobby was a weird misuse of the game mechanics. 'Duels'—although hard to see these days after the success of his reformations—were a little fake, as the sceptic might deduce from contextual clues like characters dropping items on death or almost none of these studied martial arts being directly for duelling. If Saana—again, a multiplayer game—had ever had any official '1v1s', it'd only been assassinations.