The Archive of Runeterra

Every story Riot has published about Runeterra, in one index: 1,752 cinematics, short stories, comics, biographies and soundtracks, filed by zone, by type and by where each one falls on the in-world timeline.

What the Archive is

Riot has published its fiction across a decade of unconnected surfaces: a story microsite, YouTube premieres, in-client events that closed after a fortnight, printed comics, soundtrack releases, patch-day cinematics. Nothing ever gathered them, and a good deal of it is no longer linked from anywhere Riot still runs. The Archive is that gathering. Every entry here opens the original work and carries what the original rarely did — the zone it belongs to, the champions in it, and the other pieces it connects to.

What the index leaves out matters as much as what it holds. Champion spotlights, cosmetic trailers with no story in them, tournament recordings and storefront promos are filed out of the archive, because a search for Ionian short fiction should not return a battle-pass advert. The 1,752 works counted above are the filtered set: what this page lists, not what the database holds.

The thirteen zones

Runeterra is not one setting. It is thirteen zones with their own histories, laws and magic, and almost every story belongs to one of them. Demacia outlaws the mages it breeds. Noxus conquers on merit and means it. Ionia is still answering for an invasion it survived. Bilgewater runs on salvage and debt, Piltover on progress, and Zaun on what Piltover drops through the floor. Shurima buried an empire and dug it back up. The Freljord has three claimants to one throne. Targon sits above the cloud line, Ixtal keeps its jungle sealed, Bandle City is only half here, the Shadow Isles are held under the Black Mist, and the Void presses at the edges of all of it.

Each zone page collects that zone's stories, cinematics, artwork and native champions in one place, so the reading order follows the map rather than the release calendar.

The Codex

Where the Archive files what Riot published, the Codex describes the world those works are set in. Nine wings: an atlas of the named places, a bestiary of what lives in them, the factions holding power, the races and species on the map, the weapons and artifacts that keep changing hands, the flora that is stranger than it looks, the disciplines of magic, and the comics and books Riot has printed. Entries are written from the primary sources and cite them, and each one cross-links into the other wings it touches, so a creature leads to its habitat, its habitat to the faction that claims it, and that faction to the war it lost.

The timeline puts the whole archive in order. Runeterra counts its years outward from the founding of the modern nations, and the timeline places every cinematic, story and milestone along that line, era by era, so the Rise of Shurima or the Ruination reads as a sequence instead of a pile of links.

Browse by type

The same archive, cut by form. Read the biographies if you want to know who a champion is before the fight; read the short stories if you want the prose Riot commissioned around them; watch the cinematics for the moments the rest of the canon keeps referring back to. Each index below links its complete set, not a sample.

Why this is the archive the MMO needs

Riot is building its MMO in this world, not a new one. That is the reason to keep a reference archive rather than a news feed: when the MMO names a region, a faction, a form of magic or a war, the answer is already written, and it is written in works that are twelve years and several dead websites apart. RuneGrove covers the Riot MMO from news to industry to lore, and this is the lore half — kept current, kept filtered, and kept linked so that one question leads to the next.

Most of what is indexed here was published alongside League of Legends, with more arriving through Legends of Runeterra, Wild Rift, Teamfight Tactics and Riot's printed comics and novels. Those are delivery vehicles. The canon underneath them is one world, and the Archive files it as one world.

Listen

Two of the archive's shelves are meant for your ears rather than your eyes: the short stories and biographies read aloud, and the ambient beds recorded for each zone to read them over.

Latest from the Archive