Time to pick this feature up again! This time, instead of randomizing, I simply picked the Born of the Gods card I most wanted to talk about: Forlorn Pseudamma.

This card is really cool in several ways, but also has some discrepancies in the flavor. The flavor text implies that she steals children, but the art shows her with faceless children, which would imply that they are also returned. The ability makes enchantment zombies, which would imply that they were created from Nyx, and not from the afterlife. Could someone try to fit this together?

Ignoring those issues, here's how I want her to work, based only on the name and art: A maid and the children she looks after all die in a terrible accident. They all enter the afterlife. The children, naturally, are devastated, and desperately want to be reunited with their parents. The maid does the only thing she can think of: She pulls the children with her back to the land of the living, trying to fulfill their wish. But by Erebos' decree, they lose all knowledge of their identities in the process. Now, she wanders the world with two faceless children, trying to find a mother and father none of them can remember.

I always took it as simply irrational, fear mongering, prejudice based claims from a setessan rather than what the Return is actually doing.

If the flavor text were different, I'd say that this Returned dreams of children (whether she had some in life or whatever) and when she awakens, she pulls these children from Nyx into the mortal world. Maybe Anthousa is mistaking the Nyxborn children for real ones but the flavor text more suggests the Setessans have noticed that children have gone missing rather than seeing children and assuming they're stolen.

Yeah I think it's something like that too. Since the theros zombies are supposed to lose most (all?) of their memories, she was once a mother and when she see's the children in nyx she brings them back to life, maybe back to grieving mothers? Or just keeps them for herself because maybe her children died and that's all she can remember. And since they have no faces it's kinda hard to tell who's they are.

Its time for The Amazing Squids not so famous name disection

Forlorn: desolate or dreary; unhappy or miserable, as in feeling, condition, or appearance.
This suggests that our ms. over here is miserable, or sad, which more or less supports lily's theory.

Pseud: a person of fatuously earnest intellectual, artistic, or social pretensions.
So she's...pretentious?

amma: Ones mother (often used as an informal form of address)
This also supports lily's theory more or less, as this gives some proof that she is in fact, a mother.

All in all the forlorn part and amma part pretty clearly have meaning in the name, but psued has got me stuck. Is she pretentious? Does that have anything to do with her abilities? I dont understand.

Pseudo also can mean false or not quite genuine.

Yeah, whenever a child goes missing, the Setessans have to blame it on a black card. Sickening.

Here's the token art.

Now they have masks! Maybe their parents will recognize them! That is, if they're not too busy running away in terror.

This. Ergo "Pseudoscience", "Pseudopsinae".





I was thinking more on the lines of "anything related to the Returned, since they're considered abominations by most", but whatever ill defined mockery have you.






Yes, I know who she is. Doesn't mean she's not biased or anything, especially given how Setessa is.

Guys, the Returned don't don masks of gold until they leave the underworld. In Forlorn Pseudamma's card art, she has taken two children into the underworld, which kills them and causes their faces and their identities to disappear. In the token art, the children have had masks of gold fashioned for them and they are sent back into the world as Returned.

But, again, that is inconsistent with them being enchantment creatures, which supposedly are formed from Nyx itself.

That I can't account for beyond "the card was just part of the cycle that made enchantment creatures and game needs sometimes trump flavor needs."

How is Setessa?

Probably this, in all likelihood.

Violently xenophobic, from what the Guide insinuates.

All of the polei are violently xenophobic.
They're constantly at war with one another and under siege from the monsters of the wilds.

True, except maybe Meletis.

I prefer to read the name as pseudomamma. It lost some humour though when I realized that that's basically what it meant anyways.