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Thank you, Uatu! They are beautiful!

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Ha ha... Luckily, the Manual of Planes notes that some Ki-rin do live in the Upper Planes, anyway (such as the Seven Heavens)...

Drawing these guys took much more effort than I expected... :(

And now for some ki-rin (qilin)/t'uen-rin trivia:

Qilin is a compound word where qi = the males and lin = the females. Females are said to have no horns (so the t'uen-rin should probably be hornless, actually, but I followed the Monstrous Compendium entry :D ).

Some people have hypothesized that the qilin was a later word for the ancient xie (another single-horned animal, but this one could distinguish between good and evil (with its horn, I think)), which may have been an actual animal similar to Vietnam's saola (when its habitat included China as well). In either case, the Chinese characters for qilin include the radical for "deer" so it does appear to be some kind of deer or antelope (thus I have decided to make my ki-rin/t'uen-rin more deerlike than some depictions that are much more dragonlike).

Ki-rin (Qilin) in Chinese: 麒麟
T'uen-rin appears to be fake Chinese :D There is no "t'uen" phoneme in Mandarin Chinese (although they tried, sticking the apostrophe there and all :) ) Perhaps we can change it to "T'ian-lin" (天麟) to say "heavenly rin" or something like that to legitimize it?

Finally, in old times some people once gave giraffes to the Chinese emperor, telling him that they were qilin; Japan has adopted this lie and calls giraffes qilin to this day :)

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Very interesting trivia. I'm always surprised to find out how much research that Gygax, Cook, Greenwood et al did for their work. I'm sure a lot of it though was that they were just big geeks who knew a lot of this kinda 'weird' stuff that they were able to incorporate into the game. :D:D:D

I thought of another creature I'd like to add; actually I thought of it before but I didn't include it b/c it wasn't an outer planes creature per se, but it is an inhabitant of the astral...the couatl. I've always thought that they were cool. :)

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Yeah, Gygax and the guys did loads of research, especially about rare creatures, old weapons, and old rituals (2nd edition got rid of some of that). They did a lot of work to incorporate the various legends of the world into a single, coherent fantasy world (the couatl being from Mesoamerica, for example).

I wasn't quite satisfied with their treatment on Asian mythology, though (it is a difficult topic to tackle, though) - Oriental Adventures did try to merge Asian mythologies together (mostly Chinese and Japanese), but ended up being like 95% Japanese (for example, only the monk and wu-jen classes were based on China) (Japan was just a small part of Asia, so I am not sure this was justified).

There were various errors as well - shukenja should be shugenja, korobokuru should be korobokkuru, kensai should be kensei, and so on... There was some good stuff in there, though (like the repeating crossbow) :)

I also never really liked the oriental dragons (from the Fiend Folio); I always thought that gold dragons (and mist dragons) were basically AD&D's answer to oriental dragons, anyway...

But anyway, yeah - couatls are cool :D Sounds like a pain to color, but I'll think about it ;)

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There were some interestin creatures from the D&D box set and expansions. Perhaps my favorite ones were a creature that resembles a rose but drains blood (a vampire rose) and a bush that hurls thorns at enemies (an archer bush). Both were introduced in the first 10 modules that I bought in a collection of 10 called "in search of adventure"

-ST

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Which boxed set was that? (I had the old basic D&D red and blue boxed sets (i.e. Basic and Expert); had a bunch of modules as well.)

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So, anyway, I did icons of Elminster, Khelben, and his wife... I dunno, they are okay, but... (Funny how almost all NPCs in the Realms seem to be as tall as possible.)

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:D Thanks. :D These are some nice icons, though something about Khelban seems a little off. I think he looks like he should be shorter based on the proportions from the belt up. Does that makes sense? His arms, chest and head seem to be in proportion to one another, but seem a bit too small for how long his robe is below the belt, so-to-speak. ;) But I like the way he looks - maybe he's just getting old and hiking that belt up a little higher...

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Yeah... um... He's having a phase (middle age and all that). :D

...Okay, I see what you mean - lemme try to fix that (yaargh - guess I'll move it down a pixel)... It' pretty hard to get the "just starting to get balding" look right :D

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No worries. :) I'll just tease him when he's around. :D:D:D