It took Stristyko a few hours and a few tries but he's got a useful plan now.

With Cheliax at war with another power, it's a safe bet its army and strongest combatants will be in the field, which makes certain revenges that have been waiting for opportunities where they're less of a risk return to consideration

Estrella isn't optimised for country roads or rural territories. It's not her speciality.
But night will fall on Egorian eventually, if he's brave enough to make a move.

The first step is to spend his current prepared Mind Blank casting Mind Blank on Estrella. Really he should have done that before he started planning, literally every plan he ever does starts like that. He'll also cast a Daywalker, just for some deniability.

The second step is to cast Greater Scrying, on a workshop manager that Estrella stole a few hairs from in a previous trip. His Greater Scryings last 15 hours, so it can be done way in advance.

The third step is Estrella read everything in this envelop I'm going to bed you have my total trust.

Liches can't sleep, but they can and do rest, or at least Stristyko rests, he hasn't asked a lot of other liches.

Estrella will spend the afternoon collecting resources and making preparations as instructed by envelope.

She'll pick a moment an hour before dusk, when the workshop manager is alone in his office, to teleport directly behind him.

The industrial workshop has on duty one shift manager, six overseers, eight security guards (essentially just thugs with the benefit of being human), and around a hundred halflings. They make leather boots, in mass.

The halflings are well-suited to it, their tendency towards cheerful obedience no matter their terrible living conditions make them slaves by nature, their small hands are good for detailed work where their lack of strength isn't a problem, and their long lives give them enough time to master the necessary skills despite their lower intelligence.

Of the 82,000 souls in Egorian, almost 8,000 are halflings, and most of them are living approximately like this.

The shift manager can watch them all working from his office, raised and overlooking the production floor.

Dominate. "Act normal and await further orders."
Gaseous Form.

Dominate. "Act normal and await further orders."
Gaseous Form.
...

There is no limit to how many people a vampire can Dominate at the same time.
It's caster level 12, and only takes a standard action to do and a moment more to give them orders. The will save dc is 10 + (level/2) + cha.

Most commoners do not have a good Will save, and with a weak enough Will save escape is literally impossible. If they do pass, Estrella can retry as many times as she wants.

Also the range is 30 feet.

It's not as powerful as you'd think. You can at best expect to place about three or four dominates a minute, since you also need time to give orders, and it's not like people conveniently line up to be mind controlled.

Subjects resist this control, and any subject forced to take actions against its nature receives a new saving throw with a +2 bonus.
A Sense Motive check against DC 15 can determine that the subject’s behavior is being influenced by an enchantment effect.
Changing your orders or giving a dominated creature a new command is a move action.
Obviously self-destructive orders are not carried out.

Even if it takes the target city half an hour to notice what you're doing, that just gets you approximately 60 commoners who quickly get captured by the guards. Even if you can dominate the guards, they'll notice faster because they watch each other, and then a smaller but more elite group can arrest them and you're right back where you started.

A dominated person can be made to pick a fight they'll almost certainly lose, like when forcing an adventurer to try to kill the rest of his party, but he can't be ordered to kill himself intentionally.

Estrella has 14 Charisma, +4 from being a vampire, +6 from the headband she's wearing tonight instead of her wisdom one. The save DC is 10+6+7 = 23.

For a mere spawn the DC is only 14, commoners can beat that a good fraction of the time, and will almost always break free eventually.

Estrella is a powerful enough vampire to enslave 6 spawn at a time.

Unfortunately, for those spawn to be much use at home they need to know Stristyko exists, and knowing that means they're not allowed out of the dungeon except under many complicated conditions one of which is being Mind Blanked and Stristyko can't cheaply cast seven Mind Blanks in one day.

The utility-security trade-off that Stristyko calculated Estrella should settle on is that she keeps two harems of spawns.

Her primary harem has eight vampire spawn members currently. They are technically free willed undead except for how they're trapped underground with no escape, Stristyko can cast threnodic mind control spells, and Estrella can torture or kill them at her pleasure. She selects for beauty, youth, and obedience.

Her secondary harem has six more vampire spawns. They are killed and replaced between missions to minimise information loss. They are all magically enslaved. They are prevented from learning that Stristyko exists, that the primary harem exists, or any of Estrella's strategic situation, and are required to wear blindfolds in Estrella's unmasked presence.

Estrella has many fetishes, and both harems have unique charms. In addition Estrella keeps a bloodbank of around a dozen mortals, which is a different kind of fun. 

Disobedient slaves, expired food, and spawn who have outlived their usefulness, are fed to Stristyko's pet Cacodaemon, who is also very uninformed but does not particularly care. Her private quarters are split over three floors and take up around a fifth of Stristyko's permenant Private Sanctum.

Once the people looking up from their work have swapped teams, she'll arrange a meeting in the shift managers office, and pull her secondary harem out of their hiding place in her Bag of Holding.

As soon as they're out, they'll re-dominate all her existing thralls, with a command that if they break free of their mistresses control they should report back and request re-dominating.

Next order of business: Order the slaves to come to the office in small batches. They'll send them back to their workstations with orders to act normal and continue their work, until they've gotten through the whole factory floor. It'll take about another twenty minutes.

If it's Cheliax and you start with their superiors, occasionally people will in fact line up to be dominated.

It's not that they aren't passing the perception check to see that their boss is under an enchantment, it's just that even having noticed that, it still seems unwise to try to refuse.

Once she's almost done she'll want to hit the next biggest worksite, but it's still daylight. She can't go outside without being incinerated because Sarenrae hates her for literally no reason, and she needs to save her teleports for the trip home.

What she'll in fact do is leave a spawn in command of this batch, and bring the others with her as she uses gaseous form to pass through tiny pipes into the sewer system.

Navigating by sewer is a very difficult task for some other person who isn't Estrella.

The spawn left behind will open her own Bag of Holding.

"We're going to be using all of you to start fires around the city. You're the first batch, so you'll have targets the furthest away.
We'll need you to carry two jugs of oil each, find somewhere flammable near these location - she'll show them a map - pour out the oil while nobodies looking, and then we've got some instructions for each of you in an envelope to read, for how to get it started. How many of you can read?"

Pretty much everyone with at least 3 intelligence who isn't blind or a barbarian can read.

Even small water elementals can read.

"Great. You're not heading out yet, but we can hand out the bags and do some stretches first.
Remember what's important: Get to a target location, find something flammable not closely guarded, pour out the oil, immediately read the instructions for how to get it burning, follow them, and then run back here. Avoid the attention of guards by acting normal if you have to, otherwise just try to sprint past them if they catch on."

It's not yet dark, but it's close. It's the time of day where abused halflings try to run home, to avoid a fine.

It's not weird that a lot of abused halflings are trying to run places.

Some of them are going towards middle-class districts, and warehouses, and the like. It's not weird. They've probably got a delivery.

A guard will stop one anyway, because it's funny.

If you keep them long enough asking demanding questions night will fall and you can fine them for that, and if they try to run away you can break their legs.

He'll run for it.

Does he think he can outrun someone with class levels?

Real ones, obviously, not expert or commoner.

He'll be tripped under the cobblestones, and his package will break open and begin to leak.

He'll try to argue his innocence, and claim that he's just making a delivery and has limited time.

Did this guy just attempt to bluff a guard? and fail?

There's an envelope. It says "read on arrival".

Oh, and now he'll pass the perception check. The halfling's under some kind of enchantment.

Incendiary Runes is a 1st circle permanent until dispelled trap rune for 1d6 fire damage to the reader and adjacent squares. It has no material components. Anyone within 10 feet can attempt a reflex save for half damage. Anyone within 5 feet can attempt a reflex save to avoid catching fire.

Explosive Runes is a 3rd circle permanent until dispelled trap rune for 6d6 force damage to the reader and adjacent squares. It has no material components. Anyone within 10 feet can attempt a reflex save for half damage.

There are no other spells like them.

To an experienced wizard, it may as well say "Scroll of Fireball, free, self-only".

The only price is that you need an idiot to cast it. Dominate Person is a great source of idiots. It's not obviously self-destructive, because you don't tell them it's an explosive rune.

Stristyko has been around a long time, and most of his days have not seen any high-stakes combat. A lot of his days are just spent crafting, or researching, or managing resources, and he often ends up with some leftover slots he doesn't particularly need.

Originally, on these days, he would write an explosive rune on a small disc of copper, and just collect them.

For higher spell slots, there are a few other fun things you can do.
Elemental Spell metamagic adds +1, makes the damage any of acid, cold, electricity, or fire. He usually picks fire.
Empower Spell Metamagic adds +2, increases the damage rolled by half.
Maximise Spell metamagic adds +3, makes the damage always the highest it can roll.

Later he'd mostly switched to metamagic rods, they're not that expensive for spells of low level. A normal Maximise Rod, for example, works on an Empowered Fire Explosive Rune and only costs 54,000 gp. It works on 3 spells per day, so if he hasn't used all the charges yet on a given day of mostly crafting he may as well put some on runes.

There are 3,652 days in a decade, and Stristyko has multiple spare spell-slots going on most of them. He's got a lot of spell-slots.

Liches with decades to do spell research often invent magic items. Since there aren't any weird special components, the Quill of Explosive Runes wasn't too complicated, really. It only costs 27,000 gp.

It lets him scribe one Explosive Rune for free, per day, albeit at a much lower caster level.

The point here is that, if this is the most interesting thing Stristyko is planning on doing this year, 300 Explosive Runes, many with metamagic mixed in, isn't that expensive.

The Guard of Cheliax opens and reads the envelope, and while he's not immediately dead, he is dying.

He's also on fire.

And when that backpack of oil exploded, some of it splashed him as well.