You have probably heard of Barin Sengir, or his progeny, the Sengir Vampires. What you probably didn't know, was that his grandmother, Ravi Sengir, was a powerful planeswalker from Dominaria.
Ok, so, she wasn't actually his grandmother. She did, however, have a significant role in the baron's origins. When Ravi was a young girl, a plague swept through her village, killing her mother. At her funeral, Ravi met the future baron as young man, who told her that his father was responsible for the plague, having unleashed infected rats on the village in order to study the effects of black magic. The only way to save the village was to kill his father, said the boy, and he taught her how to control rats with a song. The reason Ravi had to kill him was that the law prevented a son who killed his father from inheriting his lands and title (which was, of course, Baron).
Ravi was hesitant at first, but after her father died from plague too, she attacked the elder baron's castle with controlled rats. The two youngsters, however, had neglected to remember that the elder baron could control the rats with his music too, and thus an epic rap battle was fought for control of the rats. Confised, that rats attacked and killed the only person who wasn't singing, the young future baron. Horrified, the elder baron stopped singing to cast a spell - allowing Ravi to use the rats to kill him. The younger baron had been restored to (un)life by his father's spell - now and forever he was Baron Sengir, vampire lord.
Years later, Ravi ascended and became embroiled in a war between two factions of planeswalkers on the plane of Ulgrotha. In an attempt to end the war, she used a powerful artifact: the Apocalypse Chime. After ringing it, she sealed herself inside a magical coffin to escape its effects. The Chime was, however, even more powerful than Ravi realised. Not only did it kill all planeswalkers on both sides of the war, it killed almost everything on the plane, and disrupted the plane's leylines, ripping away all of Ravi's mana bonds to the land - now unable to planeswalk away, she was trapped inside the coffin for centuries. The destruction spread further than Ulgorotha, affecting the nearby planes of Dominaria and Kamigawa, and forming rifts that linked the three planes together.
The rifts created by the Chime allowed the Myojin of Night's Reach and Toshi Umezawa to travel from Kamigawa to Dominaria. Toshi's desendant, Tetsuo Umezawa, later defeated the Emperor of Madara, Nicol Bolas, coming perilously close to killing the dragon with a meteor hammer. Thus, Ravi is indirectly responsible for the downfall of Nicol Bolas and his 400 year exile. Lets hope Bolas never finds that out.
As for Ravi, she was imprisoned for over 300 years, long enough to drive her completely insane. She didn't even remember who she was - or recognise the man who eventually opened her coffin - Baron Sengir. Due to retcons, there is corrently no offical explanation for how the Baron ended up on Ulgrotha - but we can probably go with the easiest: 'He traveled there via one of the apocalypse rifts'.
The Baron gave a place at his castle on Ulgrotha, the aptly named Castle Sengir, and told everyone she was his grandmother. But all of these stories serve as mere backdrop for the Homelands set - though we are told they are evil, in the actual Homeland comics, the Sengirs don't do anything important at all. Instead, the story is focused on Feroz and Serra falling in love, and on Sandruu and Taysir fighting over Kristina (for such a backwater plane, Ulgrotha certainly attracts a lot of high-power planeswalkers). The Baron is actually quite pleasant towards Feroz and Serra, and after their deaths he seems genuinely sad, leaving a rose on Serra's gravestone.
While Serra's story is about the effect of loss and grief, and Kristina's is about the dire consequences of jealousy, I am left wondering what exactly the point of Ravi's story is. Her descruction of Ulgrotha in the distant past has no emotional impact on us, as we didn't see Ulgrotha before the Chime, and we are not given any information on any of the planeswalkers who Ravi killed. The story also makes it clear that the Baron wasn't looking for her, and his freeing her was nothing but coincidence, which is an odd angle to go for. Perhaps the story was written merely to set up the rifts, to allow laters stories to feature travel between Dominara, Ulgrotha and Kamigawa.
