One of Draw Steel's major selling points is the way that the intensity and stakes of combat go up the further the heroes push into danger. While its obvious antecedent, D&D, is built on the gradual draining of resources, meaning that the most exciting round of combat is typically the first, Draw Steel naturally forces characters to hold back their most powerful abilities until combat has been going for a while, as they'll need to build up their resources to pay for their most expensive moves. The way that Victories grant the characters a head start on their resource generation then lets the later battles of an adventure is thus meant to make the confrontation with the adventure's main villain feel bigger and more explosive than the battles that preceded it.
However, this principle is not limited to players. The Director (Draw Steel's name for the Game Master) gets their own resource: Malice.
Malice is earned by the Director, and is shared by all the monsters they control, so thank god you don't have to keep track of different amounts of Malice for each of your individual bad guys.
Many, if not most, of the monsters in the Monsters book have a few abilities that can spend Malice. Like for PCs, these might be main actions, maneuvers, triggered actions, you name it.
But beyond that, entire categories of monster will have a shared set of Malice abilities, each of which can be used at the start of a monster's turn.
Now, I'm someone who loves using undead monsters - I love a good army of skeletons, zombies, and the like (probably goes back to my love for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion of World of Warcraft, along with my general love for Halloween, which dates back to early childhood).
The entire category of Undead monsters has universal Malice features. These are broken up by Echelon, which is Draw Steel's term for Tiers of Play (because, if there's one truly distinctive aspect of this game, it's the resolute refusal to use the conventional terms for freaking anything).
Thus, Undead creatures of the 1st Echelon (levels 1, 2, and 3) have four Malice abilities they can trigger at the start of their turn.
Ravenous Horde (2 Malice) summons two rotting zombies (which are minions, essentially 8 of them are a worthy match for one hero) next to each hero who isn't already adjacent to an undead monster.
Paranormal Fling (3 Malice) shoots up to three unattended objects on the map at nearby heroes, which invokes rules about objects hitting people (rules I must confess I haven't yet read).
The Grasping, the Hungry (5 Malice) has undead arms burst out of nearby surfaces, forcing an Agility test to anyone ending their turn adjacent to the arms that will damage and can restrain them.
Dread March (7+ Malice) gives up to four undead monsters in the encounter the ability to move up to their speed and make a free strike, and you can spend extra Malice to move more monsters, none of whom die even if they take damage until they finish this move and attack.
Now, you look at that 7+ Malice, and you might think that's going to be a lot. After all, a PC can generate at most (well, except the Troubadour) like 5 of their resource in a round. The good news (for Directors) is that Malice flows much faster than Heroic Resources.
At the start of combat, just as PCs gain a number of their heroic resources equal to their Victories, you gain Malice equal to the average number of Victories per hero (they might have separate numbers if someone died, or a player missed the previous session, or something like that). Then, at the start of each combat round, you gain Malice equal to the number of living heroes in the combat (if a hero dies, you start generating less) and then additional Malice for the number of the round.
For example, let's say the party of 5 heroes has two Victories. You start off with two Malice, and then immediately get another 5 for the heroes, and then one for the combat round, for a total of 8 Malice to use right off the bat.
All this being said, because this resource is shared between all of your monsters, you'll need a lot of it. I'd say you probably want to spend it fairly liberally as well. Even if the fight you have doesn't have any monsters that have Malice abilities, you can spend it on Basic Malice features, like the undead ones listed above (and as a reminder, those are just the 1st Echelon ones - if you're fighting Vampires or other 3rd Echelon undead, you get new Malice options).
As an example, let's say our party of 5 heroes with its two Victories is fighting 16 Shades, 4 Skeletons, and 4 Soulwights (yes, that's a lot of monsters, but it's considered balanced as a Standard encounter. Skeletons and Soulwights are "Horde" enemies, and thus there can be two per player of the same level in a standard encounter. Shades are Minions, and thus come eight to a Hero. And with two Victories under their belt, we can throw one extra "Hero's Worth" of monsters at them.)
Of these monsters, Skeletons have a 2-Malice ability called Bone Spur, and Soulwights have a 3 Malice ability called Stolen Vitality. Thus, on round 1, with 8 Malice to spend, we could do any combination of these abilities, either spread out with the monsters' specific abilities or using a big and expensive one like Dread March or The Grasping, The Hungry with just a little left over for individual monster abilities.
The next round, of course, we're going to get 7 more Malice (none from the party's victories, but it's now round 2 so we're generating a little more each round).
There is, thus, a little pressure beyond all the damage one will take each round to finish the fight as quickly as possible - the Director gains Malice at a faster rate the longer the battle goes on.
In terms of tracking Malice, the amount that a Director generates should be apparent to the players, though in theory you could be secretive about how much you spend. That being said, I think it might be fun to track it publicly: let the players know how much you have to work with, and perhaps get them a little nervous if you see you have a whole lot that's stockpiled.
Borrowing something from a game I've seen using another system, when Matt Mercer ran the Daggerheart mini-series Age of Umbra, he had a sort of abacus-like set of beads along a metal bar, which might be a fun way to visualize how much Malice you've got stored up.
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