Peter's Evil Overlord List: The 100 Rules of Not Losing

Peter’s Evil Overlord List is one hundred numbered sentences explaining, with total seriousness, how not to lose. Do not gloat. Do not explain the plan. Do not build the self-destruct button. Shoot the hero, immediately, once, in a room with no convenient window.

It has been online since the 1990s, it still lives on a page that looks exactly its age, and it remains funnier than almost anything written about villains since.

What is Peter’s Evil Overlord List?

The full title is “The Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord,” and it came out of the mid-1990s internet, when genre fans argued at length in newsgroups and mailing lists about exactly this sort of thing. The list is credited to Peter Anspach, who collected, edited and maintained it, and it grew by accumulation as people supplied their own entries. That collaborative origin is why it has such range: no single person is annoyed by this many specific things.

The joke works because the tone never breaks. Every item is written as a sober operational note from a competent executive who has studied the failures of his predecessors. Number after number, it reads like a risk assessment.

The effect is that it stops being a joke and becomes genuine criticism. Read all hundred and you have a complete taxonomy of lazy plotting. Villains lose because the story requires them to, and the list documents every mechanism by which authors arrange that: the unnecessary delay, the unguarded duct, the henchman with a name and a family, the prisoner kept alive for no stated reason, the elaborate death trap with a five-minute timer and no supervision.

The site itself has grown a small ecosystem of companion lists over the years: notes for the aspiring hero, rules for the overlord’s staff, advice for the various stock roles that surround a villain. Same voice, same deadpan register.

And the page has simply never been updated in any way that matters. No ads, no cookie notice, no scroll-triggered anything. It is a 1990s HTML document that has outlived every content management system invented since, and it loads instantly.

What can you do with it?

• Read all hundred in one sitting. It takes about ten minutes and the cumulative effect is the point.
• Use it as a writing checklist. Run a draft against it and see how many items your antagonist is currently violating.
• Follow the companion lists. The site holds several related sets covering heroes, minions and other stock roles.
• Ruin films for your friends. Once you have read it you cannot stop noticing which rule the villain on screen just broke, and you will say so out loud.
• Look at it as internet history. This is what a beloved web page looked like before design became an industry.
• Steal it for game night. It works remarkably well as a set of house rules for anyone running a tabletop campaign with a recurring villain.

Tips to get the most out of it

Read it in order, not by skimming. The numbering builds. Items that seem slight on their own land harder after twenty similar ones, because you start recognizing the pattern before the sentence finishes.

Keep a film in mind while you read. Pick something you love with a memorable antagonist. The list is much sharper when you are checking it against a specific case rather than villains in general.

Notice how many rules are about impatience. A surprising share of the hundred reduce to the same advice: do the obvious thing now instead of the theatrical thing later. That is a real observation about storytelling dressed as a gag.

Do not stop at the main list. The follow-on lists are less famous and nearly as good, particularly the ones written from the perspective of the people working for the overlord.

Treat it as a diagnostic, not a rulebook. A story where the villain violates nothing is a story where the heroes lose. The value is in knowing which rule you are breaking and why.

If you like Peter’s Evil Overlord List, also try…

• SCP Foundation: the same trick of playing absurd material completely straight, at enormous collaborative scale.
• Real Ultimate Power: another survivor of the era, committed to a single joke with terrifying sincerity.
• Acts of Gord: a game store owner’s rules for dealing with customers, written like scripture.
• Ninja Burger: a fake corporate site for a ninja-operated fast food delivery service, played entirely deadpan.

More vintage internet in Entertainment & Fun, and further oddities in Weird & Wonderful.