The tiraphegs are coming!

[Halaster Blackcloak]

Oh dear lord, they are here! I placed a colony of tiraphegs on Level 8.

They're just so damned strange, Halaster would have to love them!

Did they ever get a 2E write up? I seem to remember both the tirapheg and the flumpf being left out of the 2E Fiend Folio. A tragedy, surely.

[Beowulf]

I don't recall ever seeing them in 2E.

[McDeath]

I kind of liked this sandbox explanation :

Sleeper said:
03-31-2012 04:44 AM
Re: An improved version of the tirapheg?
Tiraphegs are artificial lifeforms created by multidimensional beings, in an attempt to study and even communicate with the strangely limited creatures who exist in only three spatial dimensions. The body shape? It's what a humanoid looks like, to being a with seven dimensions. Or rather, it's one slice of what seven-dimensional beings perceive when they view a three dimensional creature. Because they see all of us at once: From our body, like a Cubist painting with all sides visible at the same time; to that body's passage through time, like a centipede or a reel of film with a billion arms one superimposed over the next; and on through three more dimension beyond our conception. The chopped-off limbs, strangely distorted appendages, and incomplete faces are artifacts of translating this humanoid conception to a flat three dimensional shape. But it's not exactly the humanoid shape we see; parts we normally can't see appear, almost like shadows or reflections, and other pieces are absent.

Which explains the human parts, with the twisting and the multiplying and missing pieces. But there are also the odd inhuman twists, like moving the mouth to the belly, or the tentacles, or that weird foot or arm. Those are simply xenopomorphizations; just like we humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize dancing Disneyesque toys or talking cars, the transdimensional intelligences put their own stamp on these strangely carved constructs of flesh.

And what do these sad intermediary creatures do? Tiraphegs watch, and occasionally pass messages between their masters and the humanoids, and from the humanoids to their masters. But it never really works. There's a communication barrier, a fundamental misunderstanding based on mutually incomprehensible ways of looking at the world. That gulf is simply too vast. They're too alien; and to them, we're too alien. Are their intentions good, or bad? Do they want to warn us, or warn us away? Threaten, or plead? Trade, or steal? Kill, or save?

We don't know. All that's passed along is cryptograms and nonsense, word combinations and symbolic phrases that seem to have meaning, but not one we can decipher. And those fumbling attempts at communicating will inevitably, like a cascade of dominoes, turn into a fiasco that will shatter one or both races....
Analyzing old school D&D, let's reads: The Illithiad and the Tome of Magic (both AD&D 2nd edition)

[McDeath]

I liked the article by Bogleech

Some others:
Jeff's Gameblog
Malevolent & Benign - Tirapheg Week
enworld 3rd ed sandbox
Fiend Folio Sources. Whie dwarf #11 1979 its birth

[Halaster Blackcloak]

They left them out in 2E, along with flumphs. They left out a lot of cool 1E monsters. Some eventually got added back in, but many never did.

[Halaster Blackcloak]

That Citadel miniature of the tirapheg is one of the worst sculptures of an AD&D monster I've ever seen!