I attempted to combine Nunu's first, second, and third (current) lore. What do you think?
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In Factions, not only do we continue to incorporate the League as a story element, but we do our best to never discard old lore. For example, in our Burning Tides event, we combined the old "yar har har" Gangplank with the new "torture everyone mercy sank with my ship I'll <verb> your <body part>" Gangplank by saying that the former was Gangplank in his youth, when he was putting on a bit of a buffoon act while gathering power in the League, while the latter was Gangplank after he finally returned to make his move and become Reaver King.
This time around, I'm trying this with Nunu. Here's my current draft. What do you all think?
The tl;dr is that I kept the opening of the current lore (raised by the Frostguard), but then had the "loses his dad in a blizzard" event from the first two lores, then had him live with the Yetis a bit (per the previous lores), then had him end up back at the Frostguard with a sick Willump and more or less finished the current lore that way. The final modification was to incorporate the League, so that rather than just "exploring the wild", Nunu and Willump join the League to give the Yeti tribe a voice and protect them from hostile humans.
One objective here was to make the Frostguard at least a little more sympathetic; IMO, the current lore (perhaps because it's written from Nunu's perspective) makes them out to be one-sided diabolical villains, and I wanted to put a different spin on essentially the same basic facts.
Nunu, the Yeti Rider
Nunu was one of the first Champions to come forth from the Freljord. He joined the League in 19 CLE, four years before the Freljord became a member-state during the Mirrorwater conflict of 23 CLE.
Nunu was raised by the Frostguard, the ward and adoptive son of a common trapper whose original family had been killed in a cave collapse. Nunu was taught to respect and obey the monster-hunters and priests who led the Frostguard, and kept them safe from the dreadful monsters that lived beyond their citadel. Every so often, they would receive a delegate from the Avarosan or (more rarely) the Winter’s Claw, including at one point a young Ashe, who bought a few pelts from Nunu’s father.
Tragedy took Nunu from his tribe. He and his father were stranded by a blizzard during a trapping expedition. After days with no sign of rescuers, Nunu’s father braved the storm to find food, and never returned. Huddled alone in the cave, Nunu lapsed into a half-lucid state, and from within that haze that he heard, saw, and then felt, smelled a huge beast entering the cave and gripping him in its arms. But it did not kill him. It was a Yeti, Willump, who growled at him less like a beast and more like a person asking a question. Hearing Nunu’s parched groans, Willump conjured a handful of snow into a sip of pure healing water that brought Nunu back from the brink of death.
Willump took Nunu to his home, the ice-caves where the Yetis had sheltered since the devastation of the Rune Wars. Nunu had been taught to fear such magical creatures; the Frostguard taught that those who had survived the Rune Wars had been warped into terrible monsters. Yet he felt safe with these Yetis, who fed him, taught him their language, and even brought him into their rituals, whereby he learned their ancient ice magic. He played what he came to call “Yeti tag” with them, and learned to channel “snowballs” that could make even a grown Yeti stumble.
But then a Harrowing new moon brought a ghoul attack upon the Yeti village. Nunu tried to use the magic he had learned to help his friend Willump, but in his panic his spells flew apart like powder-snow. The ghouls were destroyed, but not before Willump was grievously wounded. Willump sickened from the ghoul bite, and the Yeti elders could not heal him. He was, they said, doomed to sink further and further into the undead sickness, until he was himself no more than a monster. But Nunu remembered seeing the Frostguard cure an Avarosan villager who had been bitten by a ghoul, and set out to bring Willump back to the Frostguard Citadel. When asked how he would find the path, he said with conviction that the spirits who watched over the Frostguard would show him the way.
The Frostguard were startled by Nunu’s reappearance several years after the blizzard had claimed his father. They welcomed him back in, and, albeit with some trepidation, agreed to treat Willump. Nunu had one further request: that he be taught the ways of the magic that could destroy creatures like these ghouls. It was an audacious request from a mere trapper’s son, but the mages could see the Yeti magic running through him, and realized his potential. They agreed to train him to control his powers and align them with his human nature, upon the condition that he swear a solemn oath not to leave until his training was complete—Frostguard magic was powerful, and clumsy misuse of its spells could cause terrible harm. Nunu took the oath, and began his studies.
Under the Frostguard’s care, Willump’s deterioration slowed, but did not reverse. He seemed to grow more and more distant, with his personality submerged beneath unrelenting torpor. The Frostguard had insisted that he not be fed any meat, lest the ghoul-hunger take him. But hearing Willump’s daily cries for food persist over months and years, Nunu disobeyed, and began to sneak him scraps of meat from his own meals. Willump seemed to recover, and far from transforming into a ghoul, began to act more and more his usual self. The more Nunu learned in his lessons, the more critically he thought upon the “treatments” that the Frostguard had applied. One night, he snuck into the Frostguard’s records room, and found the slender journal in which the mages had kept their notes. In that cramped room, in the middle of the night, Nunu’s shaking hands turned those crisp parchment pages, and upon them he read words like “test” and “study”. He dropped to his knees and sobbed. The Frostguard had been using his best friend Willump as an experiment. Willump had saved Nunu’s life, and now Nunu’s own people—could these be his own people?—were starving him just to see what would happen.
Nunu brought Willump more and more meat, and secretly showed him basic Frostguard counterspells to seal him against his captors’ magic. As Willump’s strength returned, so too did his ability to resist the Frostguard’s magical “treatments”. Nunu began searching the ranks of the Frostguard for someone he could trust to tell of what he’d discovered. His father, who’d shouted at him for curiously prodding a dying animal, who’d bellowed that no son of his would deny even a rat a clean death, would never have stood for this. But before Nunu could find an ally among his superiors, Willump broke free. Nunu found his cage smashed open from the inside, and scratched into the floor a crude drawing of a Yeti following an arrow out of a box.
Nunu chased after Willump, with the long, loping bounds he had learned from the Yetis, now accelerated with the subtle magic of the Frostguard that had taught him to strike his feet off the surface of the snow as though it were solid rock, and given him the resolve to travel day and night without sleep. When he reached Willump, he found he had been ambushed and surrounded by the Frostguard’s hunters, who were “walking the circle” as Nunu himself had been taught to do—slowly, over hours and even days, circling around their prey, waiting for just the moment to strike, patient as falling snow.
Nunu rushed to Willump’s aid, with more courage than sense. He stood in front of the Yeti, and told them that he wouldn’t let the hunters take his friend. The mage who had overseen Willump’s “treatment” struck him down with a lash. Willump flew into a rage, and together with Nunu, they defeated the Frostguard’s warriors. The rejuvenated Willump was nothing like the pathetic, wasting creature they had imprisoned for all those years. Nor had they seen Nunu driven to unleash the full power he possessed. The blizzard they called forth tore the landscape apart.
When Nunu and Willump returned to the hidden Yeti village, they found an Avarosan Summoner with them. She had heard stories of a human boy who had learned Yeti magic, and had resolved to bring him into the League of Legends as a Champion. “Then he’s a Champion, too,” Nunu proclaimed, accompanied by Willump’s proud roar.
The League acceded to their request, and Nunu and Willump together became some of the first Freljordian Champions in the League. Through the influence won there, Nunu was able to protect the Yeti tribe from the human world, and hone his skills against the mightiest in Valoran.
So what do you think?
