This idea has been bouncing about in my head for a few days. The concept is intended probably a historical person useful for past backstories, not likely somebody alive today. I feel like it's inevitable that somebody somewhere pre-Mending, possibly even a planeswalker, would end up with her beliefs, and the Cabal civil war seemed like a great excuse to trigger her epiphany and subesequent behavior.

Name: Hfan (either the Leveler or the Hunter)
Age: really freaking old (ascended -4823 A.R.)
Color:
Species: Rhox
Homeworld: unknown, possibly destroyed
Status: , probably dead

Appearance: Average height female Rhox, with greyish-brown skin and thin short body hair on arms, legs, and ears. She had a longish snout, pointed lips, one horn, sharp canine teeth, and golden eyes. Knowing she had acquired a reputation, Hfan often disguised herself with shapeshifting when on the hunt.

History: For centuries, Hfan's people had been peacemakers, and protectors of weaker races and of travelling merchants, diplomats, and pilgrims. Though capable of violence, they were dedicated to peace. Several peoples sheltered under their aegis, and even the warlike humans respected their peace-diplomats.

Hfan grew in this culture and took their teachings to heart. She continued to act as a helper and protector to her people and world after her ascension, rarely leaving the plane.

All of this changed during the civil war of the Cabal. Hfan watched helplessly while an organization of much older and much more powerful planeswalkers she knew almost nothing about devastated her world, wiping out her people and countless others. Broken and bereft of her life's purpose, Hfan was left with one all-consuming conviction:

Planeswalkers are a plague on the multiverse and a curse to all mortal life. They are unnatural and should never have existed.

Leaving behind the ruins of her world, Hfan dedicated the rest of her life to hunting and slaying other planeswalkers. She stalked those weaker and less experienced than herself, and eventually even began to kill mortals in whom she detected un-awakened sparks. Though she knew she could never rid the multiverse of the scourge, she became determined to kill as many as possible.

In her travels, Hfan never wholly forgot her former life as a protector and helper to mortals. When not on the trail of a particular planeswalker target, she often assisted mortals in danger and opposed those who made war. However, as she grew older she dedicated more and more of her time to the hunt.

Hfan's greatest project was the creation of an artificial plane to act as a trap for unsuspecting planeswalkers. Baited with extremely powerful mana and great artifacts taken from Hfan's victims, this world was designed to slowly funnel and drain a planeswalker's power. At its center was a place where the spark itself would be stripped from their souls. How many former planeswalkers ended their lives trapped in Hfan's world, and whether it even still exists, is unknown.

Fate: After millennia of hunting the most dangerous prey in the multiverse, Hfan had numerous enemies and could well have gotten killed by another planeswalker. If she lived to the Mending, she would have welcomed it with joy, but may have allowed herself to age and die thereafter.


So please tell me your thoughts!

This... premise has been touched upon before. That's no denouncement of the character, but rather that the plane might already exist for us to attach this too.

It was from the old forums, but someone had essentially made a money pit plane where walkers would get trapped, but I don't remember anything else about it, other than it did feature an obelisk.

I thought of the plane before fleshing out Hfan, but then I figured that just writing the plane as "A place to send your characters to lose their sparks and die miserably! " would have little attraction for the M:EM.

I suspected as much, but the old forums are too much a wasteland for me to spend any sizable amount of time on to double check (and I didn't have a name to start searching with).

I wasn't the one who suggested the plane concept before, that was someone else. I only thought of this a few days ago, after reading the Uncharted Realms story about Ob Nixilis.

Do you think the idea is worth developing further for M:EM?

Should her background/events and the description of her people be toned down to make them more ordinary? It's basically in first draft right now.

well, my thoughts that I considered as I was at work is the idea that maybe she could just be made mono-green. Mostly because we already have a W/G Pachyderm oldwalker, and even if you made her a Rhox, it might still be crowding the colors a little. Contrast is great, but as you have pointed out, we have a bunch of white walkers (Partly guilty of that, but I've tried to really spread everything out too)*

Another reason, in my mind, to make her a Rhox is because she kind of reminds me of the Stonehorn tribe, though like I said, focusing a bit on green would help the pitch and wouldn't actually require much in the way of changing her motivations or personality in the first place.

It might be a minor mention, but making her people monks in the asian tradition doesn't really resonate much with me.

*Naturally, too, because of so many details, I would have liked to see her as an ancient adversary of Sri Hara. Just something about the two crashing against each other does a lot of interesting things narratively.

She doesn't have to be specifically Rhox or Loxodon, I just think that her particular people couldn't possibly be human... I can't imagine any human society behaving anything like that. (Yes, I'm a misanthrope against my own species.) And we have so many human planeswalkers. She could be a Centaur instead. Maaayyybe even a Fox.

I agree that there are more than enough white 'walkers already, but on the other hand there's no reason she has to still be alive in the present. I'm not sure how to depict her motivation without the white part. Maybe if she was more motivated by the way that 'walkers mess up entire planes by blasting off the life? Not so much the inequality of having some people become gods at random without deserving it, but more how they mess up the natural order... but messing up the order of things is something that bothers white. She can be mono-green and still be pissed and horrified by scads of entire societies and civilizations being wiped out, right?

I am certain she wouldn't make sense without the green part, and I don't want to make her black like Garruk. Her motivations should be different from his.

Centaur could work, but I would suggest against Fox.
And Rhox can still work too.

More or less, I think she already IS green. One can be concerned with how unnatural things are and how much damage they do to societies without having to be white. The colors are more robust than that. She can focus on the community aspect of green without having to sink into the Treehugging part of green.

Green is... sort of tough because of the values they've beaten us in the face with. Sometimes it takes a lighter touch.

Like I said, mono-green is fine and as she is, it works already.

I've edited the OP to incorporate several of the suggested changes. How's it look now?

She doesn't necessarily have to be as old as all that. Any smaller war between a handful of ruthless old-walkers at any later date could have wrecked her world. Witnessing the ruination of multiple worlds would be a stronger motivator for millennia of murder, though.

I like this character a lot! In particular I actually like the idea that she's dead as of the current timeline. I think it provides an incentive to start building some story nexus points further back in the pre-mending timeline.

She's also interesting as a contrast to Garruk who hunts planeswalkers because... black... makes you... evil... or... something. You know it'd help WotC with their whole black=/=evil white=/=good thing if they actually STUCK TO THEIR GUNS instead of introducing white when a character acts good and black when a character acts bad. Grumble grumble.

But yeah she's an interesting foil to his character.

And I like her legacy, though like the Amphiseum it's a setting that has limited use unless for characters that don't have a long lifespan ahead of them.

I'm ambivalent on the ties to the Cabal. Other sources of her ire could stem from Ellia herself individually, Ellia's Coven, the Missing Pieces, Raiker Venn, or Vasilias. Or I guess the Dual-Walkers though at this point they've probably racked up enough enemies, whereas the others might need some more expansion.

The only thing about her motive is that she needs a good reason to believe that ALL planeswalkers are too dangerous to live. I think that her world should be ruined by a several of planeswalkers, not just one or two.

Other than that, I do think she should be an oldwalker with a long pre-Mending history of killing, and no in-story requirement to have survived even to the Mending.

well, the chessmasters are really effective at ruining worlds, but I don't really want to draw them in to this. Though, if she were a victim, both in the offing and getting offed by, then it would change a little, but I'm not big on it still.

freakin sorin....

I thought of you while I wrote that post.

Yeah, the trick with Vasilias is that he kinda works alone.

The Coven is very promising but they only sort of exist in this weird talked-about space and Jedi's been too busy to get involved with finally fleshing them out, unfortunately

Speaking of the Chessmasters, how far developed is the Shifter? Is there any possibility Barinellos that I can convince you to have the Shifter be the red planeswalker who was involved in that war on Acharu?

Yeah early on in the Shifter's development we discussed the possibility that the red planeswalker on both Acharu and Ordren was the Shifter. I still really like that idea actually.

How far back is that conflict?
He's been fleshed out a bit more now, so that might not jive with his timeline.

I thought they were both pretty old?

I don't think the events on Acharu or Ordren happened all that long ago... a few millenia tops I believe.

Sorry it took so long for me to get to this.

I really like the character. I once created a similar character in a different, non-MTG setting, and I liked it a lot. This one, I think, is more developed, and like Keeper mentioned, I like the fact that she's already dead at some nebulous point in the past. I'm not as sold on the artificial plane thing, but the character itself I like a great deal.

Thanks for posting!

What would you do rather than the artificial plane?

Personally, I would just drop that plane part of it. I don't think the character needs it, to be honest.