It is time once again for the interplanar potluck! What is your ocs bringing to the get together?
Halona brings a whole tray of lumpia. It's sort of like a savory spring roll from the Philippines (and Indonesia). I've always had it at parties as both an appetizer and a side for the "main" course so it's a good all arounder.
Nireta feels like an appetizer/snack person. Assuming it's people she likes, Nireta brings homemade pita bread and dip. Something people can snack on while they do other things. (Unless it's like my last potluck in which case she buys two bags of doritos and calls it a day. Come on, guys why was I the only one to make anything.)
Catrina and Pahandi are both people who say they'll bring one thing and then bring way too much. Catrina would bring a whole bunch of meats she's hunted, butchered, and cooked herself on top of all the beer she brings (she said she'd bring just a case, but comes in with, like, two kegs). Pahandi comes in with, like, wo different dishes with back up trays in case they run out, her own rice cooker cause rice goes with everything, and take out containers so people can bring home leftovers.
Halona would definitely Infernape, Blatoise, and Wobbafet. Two are similar to her umbras and Wobbafet for the counter/counter-magic connection.
Nireta would be Oricorio, Noivern, and Honchkrow. Fits her dark and noisy theme, but man is she gonna be stomped by an electric trainer. A Primarina would also be a good fit for her.
Aegislash, Tyranitar, and Garchomp fit Catrina. She'd have a scary stacked team. She should have a Marshadow, but I don't think giving her a mythical pokemon would be fair.
Pahandi's a hard one since I haven't really characterized her at all. Oranguru feels like a good thematic fit. Torterra and Drampa feel like they'd work too. If Catrina had Marshadow, Pahandi's on brand legendary would either be Lugia or one of the Legendary Birds.
Halona and Nireta are similar in love in that they are romantics in different senses since they're both tied to emotions, but on different ways. Halona accepts and enjoys love, both romantic and platonic. She loves her friends, she loves her girlfriend, and she's very open with it.
Nireta is romantic at a distance, pining and longing for something. It's something she wants, but she struggles to open up with others. Partially its because her views of romance are colored by novels and myths and its given her a very biased and romanticized view of love. It's also part of her character of her lack of control in parts of her life and this control of her romantic love (or lack there of) is something she has trouble letting go of.
Catrina and Pahandi also have similar views. Both are extremely old and have lived long, lonely lives. Romance is somewhat in the past for them. Neither of them hate it, but they also aren't looking to rekindle anything. They remember it fondly, although it comes off stronger with Catrina since it would be one of the few tender periods in her life.
I had to take a day to finish the write up for my last walker in @leafdrake-haven‘s Fanwalker February, Pahandi! She’s only really appeared in a handful of things I’ve done and she’s probably the least developed of the 4. I don’t think wrote up is complete either, but I think it gets everything across.
additional art by @hazoret
Name: Pahandi Tulog
Colors: Bant (White – Blue – Green)
Age: Between 800-1400
Plane of Origin: Balatog
First Planeswalk: Shandalar
History:
Pahandi has never revealed much of her youth before sparking into a planeswalker. She carried many titles back home; healer, mystic, counselor, advisor, but she never told which one lead to her sparking. All anyone knows is that she set off one day on a pilgrimage to the First Tree and did not return for many years.
Pahandi had sparked on her journey, ascending to the godhood of planeswalkers of old. She used her new found gifts to continue her work across the planes of the multiverse. As she traveled, she began to learn of the horrors outside her home. Planeswalkers who abused their power, unthinkable monsters who consumed planes, machine monsters who spread and consume in the name of a dead god. While she did learn a great good for each evil she faced, she couldn’t help but fear at how fragile Balatog truly seemed now. When she finally returned home, she resolved to be its protector.
At first, she started combating hostile arriving planeswalkers directly, but even after creating a great avatar to fight by her side, she knew that was not enough. Using the spells she had learned from her travels she thought she could deter more from arriving, but found that only the most determined now came to her home. She began traveling the multiverse again, retracing her steps to learn the great spells she had once heard of and each time she would return home to erect and expand a great wall around it. However each spell added was not only a greater strain on the world, but another stone on precariously stack tower. Should she fall, so would it. After much deliberation, she came to the only decision she could think of. Secreting herself off into deep and warped part of the world, she sealed herself off in crystal at the heart of her spell so her body could be both a battery and anchor for it. There she would sleep in suspended animation, sleeping through the wars that shaped the Multiverse and the Mending, waking in the present times into a far different world.
Personality: Calm, collected, and decisive, Pahandi is rarely taken off guard. She exudes a tranquil aura and talks with a sagely wisdom that only comes with her hundreds of years of travel and meditation. However kind and caring she genuinely is, she can be emotionally distant from everyday people; she is sympathetic to others, but not completely empathetic. This comes mainly from her nomadic and solitary lifestyle. This leads to her biggest emotional problem being she tends to only think in terms of the big picture and can easily miss the personal details in things.
Powers and Magic: A scholar and a mystic, Pahandi has studied many schools of magic making it hard to really nail her down into one. She has worked as a healer, both physically and spiritually. She’s a practiced banisher, destroying evil spirits and removing planeswalkers from worlds. She can manipulate space and the elements, letting her run along walls and surfaces she shouldn’t be able to and can even move on water and air as if they were just as solid as stone. She’s a capable auramancer, animist, hieromancer, and mentalist.
She carries a long, hooked wooden staff that is as tall as she is. It’s her magical focus and let’s her channel even more powerful magic. With it, she can do something like eject a planeswalker of equal power from a plane with ease.
The last thing of note is that while she is on Balatog, the more powerful she is and the closer she is to it’s dimensionally distored part where she slumbered, the closer she is to her Oldwalker power level.
Character Themes:
“The Sacrifice” - Pahandi was willing to sacrifice everything for her home without a second thought. While it might not have been the perfect plan, it was her best option and she knew that it was a guarantee to keep it safe.
“The Great Sage” - Much like Catrina carried the reputation of being deadly and sometimes more of a force of nature than a person, Pahandi was known for her astuteness, her spirituality, and her wisdom. There are a few legends that have spawned from her travels on several planes and she was on good friends and associates among the other oldwalkers she met before she hid Balatog.
Notes and Asides:
Although I didn’t mean to have them mirror each other, because of their shared plane and culture, a lot of ways to describe what Pahandi is by going by what Halona isn’t. Where Halona is more of a scout/ranger/explorer, Pahandi’s roots are more shamanistic and mystical. While both have passions to learn and explore, Pahandi is much more studious and spiritual in her approach. Where Halona would be brash, courageous, and forward, Pahandi’s movements are careful and measured. Halona is a sprint. Pahandi is a dance.
While they haven’t met in story yet, Pahandi and Halona had a lot of inadvertent influence on each other. Pahandi’s binding and hiding of Balatog led to the aether storms that cause Halona to spark and Halona’s sparking and damaging of the binding set in motion Pahandi’s eventual reawakening.
Pahandi powers were inspired by a combination of pillowfort, tax, and control style decks. Grand Abolisher, Feroz’s Ban, Energy Field, and Aura of Silence.
A lot of Pahandi’s powers and what she has done can be seen in my Balatog posts.
Second to her Ban, her ability to walk on air was the second thing I thought of her being able to do. I’d imagine in and of itself, it’s not extremely impressive, but the fact that she can do it so effortlessly and naturally makes it startling. That combined with her staff, one of the key images I had of her was her running in the air, upside down and sideways to attack from such an odd angle, and hooking an opponent around the neck before violently and instantly ejecting (read exiling) from Balatog. I originally thought of this spell working like trying to force a planeswalker either to their homeplane or to the plane they are most familiar with. She would try to do this on Halona only to realize that one, her anti-magic kept stopping the spell, and two, even when the spell did get through, it didn’t work cause Balatog is her home as well.
So I still haven’t finished my next fanwalker’s profile yet, but a big part of her backstory was revealed in the last Balatog post I made in April. Hopefully I get her finished soon, but here’s a little Fanwalker Friday preview of her signiture spell, Planar Expulsion.
Okay, final post for Balatog. No story for mood and setting this time. It was too much of a rehash from last time’s post with Halona standing in front of awe-inspiring power that dwarfed her that it didn’t feel necessary. But to cap off this whole shebang, I commissioned this piece from @hazoret about 2 months ago and I’ve been sitting on it so I can post it and I’ve been sitting on this character for almost a year now.
The Setting
The Root is the inner most part of Balatog, a collapse in time and space created by its protective spell. Found far beneath the Fold and accessed by diving off its iconic cliff, it is more similar to a pocket dimension than anything. The leylines of the world wrap around here, both protecting the Root and powering the spell. Crystals of condensed mana dot the expanse, giving it the appearance of a starry, galaxy filled sky. While ground is not hard to find here, most of its “solid ground” is composed of floating pools and lakes of mirror-like, opalescent water. At the center is a large amethyst like crystal acting as both a channel for the plane’s mana for the spell and housing its creator, Pahandi Tulog.
Pahandi Tulog is the planeswalker from Balatog’s legend and the one who cast the spell to protect it. Somewhere between several hundred and a thousand years old. She had spent much of the first part of her planeswalker existence off plane, traveling from world to world studying and learning the Multiverse. Where Halona would come to travel to planes as an explorer and thrill seeker, Pahandi was a scholar and a shaman and treated this new life as more of a spiritual enlightenment. But over the decades, that wonder turned to horror. Events such as Urza’s wars and experiments, the fighting between Ugin and Bolas, the binding of the Eldrazi, and the Phyrexian invasion showed her how small and how fragile her world was. When she eventually returned home, she resolved to be its protector.
At first, she started combating hostile arriving planeswalkers directly, but even after creating a great avatar to fight by her side, she knew that was not enough. Using the spells she had learned from her travels she thought she could deter more from arriving, but found that only the most determined now came to her home. She would travel more to learn more and add to her wall, but each spell was just a raised the barrier of entry and the writing was on the wall that one day one of these interlopers would be her doom. Determined to protect her home to the bitter end, but knowing that her magic would not last without her to guide it, she made one last sacrifice. She bound herself to the world, putting herself in suspended animation at the center of her spell to make her own body and soul both a battery and focus for it. As she fell into her slumber, her mind drifted and her subconscious merged with the elemental creature she had created and fought along side for centuries. Athal-Pati, gaining the new sentience and power, continued the mission of protecting the world never truly knowing how it worked or for what purpose until Halona damaged the spell with her sparking.
The Idea
The general gist of the story would be that Halona, after deciding that neither keeping the Ban as is or taking it down were all that great options, would go to find the source of the spell and see if she could manipulate it. She and a party, either her planeswalker friends or planebound locals, would bum rush the Fold before diving deeper into the Root. They would explore for sometime, amazed at the splendor of this warped part of the plane until they stumble upon the sleeping Pahandi in her jewel. Pahandi would break out of her trance and attack the party in a haze, thinking they are invaders. Driven to back to the surface by her magic, she would overwhelm the group as her connection to the plane gives her power near if not equal to that of her height pre-Mending.
After forcing several of the friend-walkers off plane, pushing them into forced planeswalks, she stops only when Halona is able to get an upper hand fighting back when Pahandi find her magic has no effect on Halona (both because of her anti magic nature and for the fact that Pahandi’s spell forces the walker as close to their home plane as they can and Halona is already home). Pahandi, realizing the gravity of the uncontrolled collapse of her spell without support, tries to rush back to the Root, but Athal-Pati uses what they believe to be the last vestiges of their power to slow her down and let Halona beat them there.
The Problem
I really didn’t have much planned at this stage of the world actually. What I have here in the section above is just all the loose notes I have strung together and even the ending isn’t the final one, just the one I had written the most coherently. I think the main issue and the reason why it didn’t have many concrete or exclusive to itself problems was because all the problems from the earlier stages, the unfinished world building and the indecisions from the previous post, meant that there wasn’t enough to build up from.
I guess to end on a happier note than last time, I still really enjoyed the project and Pahandi as a character and I really should do a full write up of her eventually.
Been having a blast with Wilds of Eldraine, so I wanted to ask if your oc had their own special Role just for them what would it be called and what would it do?
I really want to stick with names that could work inside fairytale and really try to hit the archetypes.
I think Halona's could be "Trickster" since the name and themes behind it fit her to a T, but the mechanics are a little tough. They already used ward for Royal and hexproof is too strong for a common enchantment. I think to fit in with other cards with trickster in the name it could be "Enchanted creature gets +1/+1 and has 'Tap: Tap or untap target permanent you don't control.'"
I think something like "Outcast" would fit Nireta. It wouldn't encapsulate her newer changes, but it does fit her core themes. I don't know if it would gain any power or toughness, but it would definitely have at least "Enchanted creature has skulk."
The name "Oracle" doesn't fully capture Pahandi, but I think it's a broad enough name that it could be used as a card. Scry would be the correct choice for this, but the Sorcerer role already does what I want so I think it would just be whenever enchanted creature attacks, do Ponder without the draw.
I'm stuck on Catrina. The two I'm stuck between are "Guardian" which fits her more white side and "Ill Omen" which fits her black side. Neither one strikes me as something specifically fairytale or folk-ish. I think Ill Omen fits the dark tones of her and evens out the unspoken color distribution the roles so far have been going with. Mechanically, it'd be similar to Wicked where it has a sacrifice trigger, but I'm not sure what. Maybe it shocks or bolts a target?
The M.O.M commander product gave us a new cards related to planes walkers in expertness and paths. While the expertness cards are interesting but straight forward, the paths I think a low for more interesting creative with regards to fan walkers. So my question is, what is your ocs path?
Halona's would be Path of the Wayfinder. I feel like to fit the 5-ish mana, rare slot the path cycles took up, her path would be something like "Target creature explores. Repeat this process once" to get her explorer theme. To fit her traditional enchantress style, it could be "Reveal the top eight cards, get an enchantment or land card, rest to the bottom in a random order" kind of thing.
Nireta would be Path of the Songbird. I think the most fitting effect would be Whispering Madness for 1 more to justify the Will of the Planeswalkers rider.
Catrina would be Path of the Predator. It took me forever to think of a name for Catrina that wasn't 1) two words and 2) not just another reiteration of "butcher" or "slayer". It's got to be a four mana, three color Languish style effect.
Pahandi would be Path of the Sanctifier. I don't want to do another removal spell so I think her's would be something like "Until your next turn creature can't attack you." I think her's would also be four mana cause I don't think this effect is amazing at rare.
