So something that bugs me with a lot of fantasy and sci-fi novels and series is that this great and terrible enemy that is the threat to all of Humanity, or all the races, is revealed right at the start.
That immortal monsters and powerful cabals can be revealed by some plucky bunch of dysfunctional do-gooders, and they do not immediately bend every available resource to not only erasing any evidence, but making it so nobody will believe the leaks, making the ‘heroes’ targets of mockery and public humiliation rather than slaughtering them where they stand. You’ve lived for centuries in the shadows, manipulating whole nations from behind rank after rank of puppets, and you choose to send your most inept minions out and then gradually ramp up the intelligence and usefulness? No, if somebody threatens to break the cover you’ve spent all that time building, you do not fumble this ball.
No. No. smacks with a rolled up newspaper. Bad writer, bad! Go sit in the corner and think about what you did.
Something or someone that has been sitting in the dark, pulling strings, granting faustian bargains, manipulating all of history is not going to fall for something so pedantic and rote as that. They’re going to have memorized the entirety of the Evil Overlord’s List, and both appendixes, and can likely recite it by memory at this point.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList
They will be trope savvy. They will know to embed themselves into society, out of sight for all but the most relentless hunters, but so vital and necessary to those who hold the reigns of power that, despite the negatives, those who rule will still fight to protect and keep the entities or creature alive, safe, happy and willing to work with them for the good of the Kingdom, the good of the rulers, or the continued survival of the species.
Vampires should not just be mucking about in old castles going “Blaaaah!” and turning into Incels over thick romanian girls with bare feet, they should, by all means, be cruel, cunning and twistedly honorable in their own ways, but the promise of immortal life while keeping most of the joys of a physical form would make them an incredibly valuable ally to any short-lived and socially advanced race, all the while their abilities to bend the minds of the weak-willed and the foolish allowing them to extend their puppeteering act through generations of rulers and councils without ever stepping into the light directly, taking only those who not only have the drive and the ambition to be useful members of their ‘Court’, but also those who have the reason and the restraint to not go rogue with feeding or trying to supplant the older Vampires or break off to form a rival group.
Taking on the ‘form’ of order of monks, sworn to secrecy and service to the rulers of the nation, who live in the catacombs of the castle and rarely venture out of it, who tend to the dead, protect forbidden knowledge and are seem impossible to find without their permission, would be a good hiding spot for the Vampires, since everyone would be looking for this mysterious order who wears hooded robes and carries strange religious paraphernalia, and not the pale guests at the Queen’s balls who seem to discreetly filter who does and does not catch her eye or bend her ear, with nothing to connect the two to the casual observer.
Even if the vampires are exposed in some way, allowing a handful of Spawn or lesser Vampires with a host of charmed mortals to take the fall while they retreat to the role of the quiet, humble monks for a generation or two, all the while their roles as the silent movers and shakers within the Courts remains uncontested, the whispering shadows at the King or Queen’s ears whose advice is as invaluable as it is heartless, while the ‘Heroes’ grow old and feeble and pass into legend, while they remain untouched by the passage of time …
Or something like a Dragon? Sitting in the middle of bum-blasting nowhere on-top of haphazard loot is dumb and a legacy of previous decades where the Dragon basically served as the challenge to overcome to get a bucket-load of amazing loot. A Dragon is intelligent, cunning, ambitious and, most importantly, incredibly dangerous. A Dragon that decides to weaponize itself not just to be a menace to virgin sacrifices everywhere, but rather its might and its destructive power to the nation whose character it can most align with in exchange for land, title and most importantly, tribute.
Knights, despite what fantasy tells us, did not ride around the countryside doing good. They sat on their mini-thrones, collected taxes, boinked their cousins and also declared feuds on their cousins because a lot of European and English/Irish/Scottish nobility was inbred on some level, and the only way to take more territory was often to take the lands of your neighbours. A Dragon, by contrast, wants a good lair and prefers to take their tribute in food to feed their vast bulk, treasure for their lairs, and soldiers to guard both. A canny Dragon, however, will begrudgingly part with some of their hoard to start business operations and openly mark their Humanoid servants as belonging to them.
Because great, you stole from this merchant band. This merchant band who works for a Dragon. For a Dragon who now has a personal vendetta against you and was so useful in the last war that the Kingdom knighted it and gave it land and title as payment.
If the Dragon doesn’t come down on you like the fist of an angry God, the local nobles and/or ruler are going to do it because they need all that power working for them on at least a cordial level, or else what the Dragon did to their enemies might now be done to them.
Over time, this mark of the Dragon becomes synonymous with security and safety. Steal from these people, dud them in a trade, offer them faulty goods, and suddenly all anyone can talk about is does it smell like burning peasant to you? Over time, this results in the mark being seen as a protective symbol, and marking those who bear it as beyond reproach. Banks are built bearing this mark, and for the protection the Dragon offers, they tithe a portion of the wealth they oversee to the Dragon for their Hoard. As the owner and primary shareholder of so many merchant groups, the Dragon is quickly one of the richest individuals, mortal or not, in not only the Kingdom, but the surrounding nations.
A wise Dragon does not flex on the local rulers, but advises them. Strong tax codes, good roads and quick guards ensure trade flows freely. Free schooling and investing in the trades and the arts not only ensures a great level of wealth and art is created for the Dragon’s Hoard, but also endears it to the locals who might otherwise be terrified of this gigantic man-eating fire-breathing gold-snuggling monster in the lands. A ‘fair’ legal system that punishes theft greatly while also offering rehabilitation means that those who would try to steal from the Dragon spend years in mines and quarries, and thus far away from the Dragon’s Hoard and possibly their eggs at this time, but also means those who fell into criminal acts are instead ‘saved’ and given gainful employment under the Dragon’s merchant bands.
Those that were desperate and have no choice grow to love the Dragon and those it works with for their benevolence and compassion, while those who embraced crime out of spite, cruelty or stupidity, wind up having ‘spit on’ the Dragon’s mercy, and thus become further divorced from the society around them, because who would hate this merciful creature who ensures their children are well educated and have bright futures, their roads and taxes are fair and put to good use, their armies are well equipped and nobody dares attack for fear of the Dragon’s retaliation?
With the Dragon acting as counsel, protector and merchant-lord ‘under’ the Ruler, despite being the de-facto ruler under all the white-washing and paint, they would rapidly become one of the most powerful and wealthy Dragons in the world, even able to manipulate adventurers and mercenaries into attacking rival Dragons, and if these Dragons possessed sorcery and the ability to assume Humanoid form, inevitably they would marry into the Royal Family, if not be the ‘traditional consort’ of the ruler, and any offspring would not only be seen by the mortals as further cementing the ‘relationship’ between nation and Dragon, but would also be powerful sorcerers with Dragon blood flowing in their veins, adding a significantly potent weapon to the nation’s armies and magical advancements.
Even moreso, if the Dragon could hide, they might prefer to maintain a Batman/Bruce Wayne act going on, their Draconic form being the stick and their Humanoid form being the carrot, one used to beat the enemies of the Nation, and thus their enemies, into submission, while the other used for diplomacy and politics to further twist everyone around their little finger until whole generations worship both Dragon and their Humanoid forms as champions and saviors of the realm …
The evil race across the border is all monsters and yet somehow just keeps yeeting themselves at you with no technological advancements? I call 
. I call it so much.
Historically, the one thing you could count on your most hated rivals for is copying your damn homework the first chance they got if you beat them. From the moment we learned how to work iron and didn’t need to play nice through gritted teeth to get the ingredients to make bronze, nominally copper and tin, from very different types of terrain, we went from beating each other’s heads in to unapologetic slaughter on a scale matched only by ant-hives fighting over territory. Once we figured out this red rock could be turned into a metal superior to bronze, that would hold an edge for longer, turn a deadly blow easier and allow an arrow-head to pierce deeper and not be turned by a rib or the skull’s dome, we went all in on this iron stuff.
If the enemy is capable of working iron, has reliable access to iron and food, and isn’t operating under a permanent cloud of wacky tobaccy, they’re gonna steal your ideas and reflavor it to their own society, and then come back and attempt to give you the business with it. Even if you shove them back into the wastes, odds are they’ve grabbed enough stuff, and had access to enough people, to copy your best, and if they’re from a wasteland or some inhospitable place, odds are they’re gonna be hard to dislodge as their supply lines are gonna be a lot more malleable than yours.
Don’t believe me? Ask the Mongolians. Ask the Chinese. The only reason that the Han ended up the dominant population amongst the Chinese is because while Ghengis had the all-time highest kill-streak in Human history, and was also one of the biggest reasons for economic and social improvement in much of Mongolia and China’s histories, his sons were … cut from lesser cloth. One was a miser, one was a racist, one was drunk and the last was … well, this is a PG forum. We won’t go into what his grandchildren were like, either.
Long story short, you’re going to need a highly specific kind of stupid to stop anything with any intelligence close to Human from copying your damn tech and then beating the cheeks off of you with their version of it. Hell, military advancement is what has driven so much of our technology in the past two hundred years, look at the jumps we made after each World War because the threat and counter-threat of each side forced the other to innovate and expand their knowledge and their technology to levels our ancestors could only have nightmares about.
Diggy diggy hole, diggy diggy out of the hole! Dwarves being purely underground has always struck me as absurd. By all means, it being their favourite fall-back strategy, but being long-lived doesn’t mean you’re not fertile, it just means your pregnancies tend to last longer, you have fewer children, and you invest more time and resources into them.
Dwarves having fast mountain fortresses is one thing, but they should never just be stuck inside them 90% of the time. Repositories for their dead, their histories and the religious sites, but ultimately Dwarves make more sense on the surface where their great durability and stamina makes them a force to be reckoned with. People forget, full plate armor was nigh impossible to penetrate with anything shy of an english longbow or a gunpowder weapons, and even those were not a guaranteed penetration, let alone a kill. You combine that with their stocky frames which included heavy skeletal structures and dense muscles to make that infamous Dwarven stamina, their well-crafted armor and shields, and their unflinchingly stubborn natures, and it would take a true horde of enemies to overwhelm them.
Hell, take Dwarves out of the European setting, plop them into any other, and they work amazingly well. Dwarves in a desert? They’re the ones who built the pyramids, because Dwarves love Mountains, so why not build their own, vast four, six or even eight-sided pyramids of stone and fired brick, designed to not only be a fortress and sanctuary, but to seal away old evils beneath their bulk, the great armies of the Dwarves not turned outwards, but inwards and down, their great pyramids sealing away ancient devils or aberrant sorcerers beneath the weight of a literal Dwarf-made Mountain atop them. Hell, go all in, have the pyramid capped with crystals and devices that not only channel and direct, but store, sunlight to permanently bathe these imprisoned threats in sunlight, keeping them forever weakened and imprisoned.
Hell, take the Dwarves to the Middle Kingdom and you have a dynasty that could rival anything Men or Elves could dream of. With strong bodies and deep bonds of loyalty to Clan and Emperor alike, the noble families of the Dwarves might maintain their mountain fortresses as a matter of pride and dignity, offering services such as funerals, training in specific skills or disciplines, while the common folk migrate and spread out between these fortresses, ensuring everyone has relatives somewhere and keeping the social harmony going, while also ensuring very long-lived people keep active, keep their minds fresh and invigorated with new places and new ideas, and also ensuring the local resources have time to renew as the population shrinks and grows as the needs of the Empire shift and change. Dwarves in mirror armor and brigandine, with tetsubos and fu axes, riding dire-boars or auroch into battle rather than horse and pony, slow moving but heavily armored, relentless and, being Dwarves, likely knew the elements of the earth like the back of their hands, and imagine the devastation of Dwarves wielding canons on the battlefield, able to shatter whole formations and to immediately shoot to death all but the most well-defended enemy troops?
There’s more, but I’m running out of puff. We’ll pick this up tomorrow.