Leatherhead
Possibly a Idiot.
Ki-rin (VGtM)
The Ki-rin is a celestial creature of goodness and nobility that looks like the cross between a golden dragon and a unicorn. While they do look cool, I have to wonder why in the heck one would associate with the Aggressively Neutral Mordenkainen on the cover of this book. They are even the cover creature for the special edition, so let's see what makes them great enough to represent D&D monsters as a whole.
Ki-rin are warriors for goodness who like the worshiping of gods related to courage, loyalty, selflessness, and truth. Which is kind of ironic seeing as how they like to hang out in opulent lairs far above everyone in the clouds. At least the lair doubles as a school of sorts, so there is some reason behind the wealth. While in their lair, the Ki-rin have some of the weakest lair actions available. None of them take effect until an entire minute has passed, so if you are fighting one you aren’t ever going to see them in action. Fortunately, the Ki-rin also spend a lot of their time traveling about, smiting evil-doers. So we can comfortably ignore the lair.
In combat the Ki-rin has a multiattack, where it can either use its horn and hooves, or sacred fire for ranged attacking. While they do have spellcasting, the Ki-rin cannot cast them as a legendary action or as part of their multiattack, so consider which ones to use wisely. The most useful spells are perhaps Banishment, for some hard control, followed by Plane Shift, to escape a fight should the situation turn dire. Their legendary actions allow them to attack or disengage around the battlefield, not very exciting I must say.
The Ki-rin also has a boatload of healing spells, but they are not very good at healing HP damage, due to the fact that they don’t have leveled spell slots. They are, however, very good at removing status effects, should your party need to break a curse or disease.
Overall, I have to say that the Ki-rin is an underwhelming monster. While it technically does all the things it says it can do, it does them in a subdued fashion. The creature doesn’t have a proper burst damage smite, it doesn’t heal very well, it can’t raise the dead unless it saw the creature die. It can’t even make useful weapons for the players to keep on their quest to fight evil. Its best use, perhaps, is as a support mount for some other creature.
In the changeover, the Ki-rin lost its Cleric spellcasting (and most of their higher level spells), which is the thing that actually made it threatening in combat to begin with: The ability to force multiply any of its minions. It gained truesight (to make up for the loss of the spell) the Sacred Fire attack (to make up for the loss of the Sacred Flame Cantrip), and had its horn attack buffed a bit.
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