I think it’s no secret to those that read this blog that I like the advice that Sly Flourish gives, and the whole Lazy DM approach to preparing for a D&D session.

A while back I was watching his YouTube video (embedded below) for the preparation he does for the weekly D&D session he runs.

These are great to watch because you get to see the Lazy DM approach in action, and pick up snippets of great advice about running D&D at the same time.

The video I was watching had a doozy at the beginning. As usual the start of the video Sly retells the events of the previous session. However during that retelling we get a great bit of advice about creating dire versions of creatures on the fly.

I liked that advice so much I thought I needed to write this down somewhere. Which brings us to the whole point of this post.

Before I note the simple steps used to create a dire creature, what is a dire creature? Up to this point like many the only other time I can remember hearing of one is from A Game of Thrones with the dire wolves. So a dire creature is a larger, tougher, meaner version of the creature (there is a brief interesting discussion about it here).

I think these following notes will be simpler to follow with an example. So I’m going to create a dire ankheg!

The first thing Sly does for a new dire creature is double the hit points of the base creature. So this dire ankheg would have 78 hit points.

Give it an extra attack action or double the amount of attacks it does. So the Ankheg can now do two bite attacks a turn.

Basically bump numerical things up a couple of points.

Give it a couple of points on the Attack & Damage, so the Bite is now +7 to hit and does 11 points of damage.

Or you could do as Sly so succinctly summarises in this tweet I stumbled upon yesterday.

I have plans for using this a lot, it’s a dire world we live in out there!