Clarity and Availability in the Lore

I love Magic: The Gathering. Like, *love *it. Not just for it being a cool and fun card game that I'm a little bit okay at, but for having such an amazing depth in story. In a card game. Card games are not typically known for their ability to tell stories and I feel like if Magic can do it, than there is absolutely no reason that Riot can't do the same. There is absolutely no excuse.

In continuing the trend of me being stupidly impressed with M:tG, the writer and designer on the Magic creative team, Doug Beyer, posted this awesome round-up where he both summarized and clarified the current on-goings of every Planeswalker (equivalent to main characters in the game) that has ever been printed:

As Magic has grown, its story venues have grown as well. You can find the storyline playing out across card art, flavor text, novels, comics, trailer videos, Uncharted Realms, Duels of the Planeswalkers, and more. As a worldbuilder and story-crafter, I'm ecstatic that Magic now has so many places to tell stories. But I'll be honest. I don't think we've been doing as well as we could at making the story clear to everyone. When all those different media tell different snippets of the storyline, the basic facts of who's doing what and who killed whom can get lost.

So let's lay it all out. Let's check in on all the usual plane-hopping suspects and see what they're all up to. In this article, I run through every active Planeswalker character (every spark-active character who has appeared on at least one planeswalker card thus far) and lay out the character's current storyline status. To the best of my ability, I'm giving you not just what's been said about each character across various media, but also what we on the Magic R&D creative team think of as the case for that character, which may help settle some confusions, and perhaps even reveal a bit of information that has never been mentioned elsewhere. Think of this as a one-stop, up-to-the-minute cheat sheet for everything that's going on with all of our Planeswalkers—last-known information, Vorthos style.

Now, to be fair to Riot, there are only 24 Planeswalkers and 119 League Champions. To suggest that Riot do something similar is no small task and would require not only a lot of work writing it up, but a ton of work actually figuring out what every champion is up to (especially since many champions have not been "brought up to date"). However, I feel like this is absolutely the stance Riot needs to have in terms of lore and how lore should be presented to players. As of right now there are countless characters whose current status is a big "???" because of either unclear or limited exposure in writing. That coupled with the fact that much of a character's background and the stories they're a part of are scattered across numerous Red posts, AMAs on Reddit or the Community Beta, and Twitter. The League Wiki is somewhat of a substitute, but what kind of message does it send when a community run and written website does a better job at conveying the depth and story behind a character than the actual company that writes them?

There are a few Golden Rules I'd like to see applied to the lore, and I don't really think it's asking to much: Lore **must **be:

• Accessible
• Easy to find
• Not overwhelming to newcomers
• Easy to understand

If Riot can't do that, then not only are they cutting out a massive amount of your playerbase from actually giving a damn about the stories they're telling but they're pushing those that do care further and further away. If you don't believe me just look at the Lore Discussion forums and see how much of it is "Discussion" as opposed to asking for "Clarification".

I'll close this short message with some of Mr. Beyer's final words in his post:

We work hard to create Magic's ongoing storyline, and the last thing we want is for those interested in knowing the story to have it hidden from them. Dedicated readers will always be able to find more deep lore than the casually interested fan, but we want everyone to have the chance to know and enjoy the main points of Magic's story.

I'm not asking for the quality to improve. I'm not asking for formats to change. I'm not asking to bring back old methods of telling stories. I'm not saying the lore is bad, or that the lore is dead, or that League never had lore.

I just want everyone to have the chance to fall in love with League's stories.