This one came out pretty janky, but I figured I'd upload what I had.

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So you've mastered mortality. An important trick for any proper wizard. But immortality, my boy, is not invincibility. A blade in the dark still cuts. Poison still burns. Powerful men attract powerful enemies, and if you intend to live longer than a few centuries, you'll need protection. A tall tower is your first, and worst, line of defense. Stone crumbles. You need living defenses, my boy. Minions!

Hiring and firing? Wasteful. You're going to want to start with a mated pair. Mortal lives are fleeting, double so for minions, but once you get them breeding, creating their own societies, they'll replenish, even train, their replacements. An immortal cultivates his minions like a farmer his flock. But be selective. Remember, you have an eternity to plan, so think generationally.

Nurture the clever. Breed the loyal. Hand out mates like treasure. Weed out aggression. Cull if you have to. Select for traits you need and, with patience, their descendants will keep dutiful watch while you soundly sleep. Their tiny lives will become things of comfort, the same grudges and victories, the old family feuds, cycling down the generations. There'll come a time when you look upon their faces and see the eyes or the nose or the mouth of a dear, centuries-departed servant, and the years won't feel quite so lonely. They're the closest thing to a family you'll have.

Where to start? Humans are versatile stock. Those apes can be bred with anything and tailored to your needs. That's a double-edged sword though. Look away for a century or two, and they'll have fucked an orc or a tree and gone to seed, ruining a lifetime of hard work, or worse, set up another kingdom.

No, I suggest starting with kobolds. They're reliable. So much so, I wonder if they were some other wizard's project from way back. They'll venerate you as a god, being natural cowards. Harmless to you but capable of handling intruders in sufficient numbers. I sprinkled several of them around my tower at the turning of the Third Age, and they still grow like weeds.

Don't be afraid to get stuck in yourself with breeding. The surest way to guide the bloodline is through your own loins. I have a broodmother I like to shift into every century or so, when their bloodlines start to become too wild. What's wonderful about kobolds is egg-laying is controlled by a small number of matriarchs - a nifty reproductive bottleneck for you to insert yourself in. I hand-pick the most loyal males beforehand. Two hundred or so. It's not exactly dignified for myself, but the little critters seem to enjoy it. The Great Lay, they call it. Did you know they orient their calendars around it? Their astrologers think I time it with the orbits of the planets. They have a whole henge built just to try to predict its coming. A time of ceremony and feasting, while those little guys form an orderly queue to fill my nubile body to bursting with the next generation of eggs, again and again, and-...

Ah... ahem I was rambling... I apologize.

Anyway, you should get started with that. You know what they say - a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will sit in three centuries from now. If you need help with a starter population, do let me know. I'd be happy to lay you a clutch of my eggs.

Or that party of adventurers you've been traveling with... why not start with them? Something to remember them by when they're gone.