Announcing the Champion Biography Project!
#Welcome to the Project!
The lore of League of Legends once described a world recovering the Rune Wars – battles on a continental scale in which magic was employed that could have wiped all life from the planet. To avoid the risk of total annihilation in the future, the nations of Runeterra founded an Institute of War that would act as an arbiter among nations, settling their conflicts before anything could escalate to open conflict. The Institute of War accomplished this with its League of Legends – gladiatorial battles on magical microcosms known as the Fields of Justice. Each champion of the League fought under the direction of a Summoner, a mage talented in a unique form of magic that allowed them to control the magic of the Fields of Justice, manipulating it so that the forces of life and death behaved differently, allowing champions to fight, fall, and rise again endlessly. Some champions volunteered to represent their homelands, others for personal gain, and others were dangerous prisoners turned over to the Institute to serve as champions as punishment for their crimes.
When each player joined a match of the game, he or she was able to imagine themselves in this role – fighting for the future of Runeterra. Each match was an emotional investment as the player fought, his or her mind linked to that of the champion they had chosen in a symbiosis meant to bring Runeterra a more peaceful future.
All of that has changed.
RIOT Games, owner of the League of Legends franchise, chose to reboot lore after several years of progressively reduced lore output. New writers were hired, choices were made, and the entire original lore of the game was removed in order to make way for something that RIOT promised us would be greater and better than anything we had seen thus far.
Time has passed since the “new lore” arrived, and there are still many of us who find the “old lore” more compelling. While many may find the new stories enjoyable, some of us simply don’t feel the same connection to the game – or our favorite champions – as we felt when we knew the future of Runeterra was at stake and our champions were listening to our thoughts just as we listen to theirs. For some us, no story could be more compelling than the one that had originally existed in the game. We have had to cling to our memory of the previously-official lore, considering it canon, to maintain our investment in the League universe.
Yet, new champions have been released. They have been released with story that grounds them in the new world, in which many champions are portrayed differently. We can stick to the old lore of an old champion, but how do we explain a new champion whose entire set of character-defining experiences are based upon interactions with a different, new lore to those older champions? Each fan is left coming up with their own theories, or they are forced to pretend “In my world, that new champion doesn’t exist and I’ll pretend its not in this match.” That’s not fun. It doesn’t feel like a valid world at that point.
That’s where we come in: the League of Legends Champion Biography Project.
We decided all these new champions needed a story to ground them in the original universe. Then we decided that all the older champions with which the newer ones had interacted now needed another story, too, so that any interactions with the newer character could get properly detailed. But then that felt unfair to older champions that hadn’t interacted with any newer ones and who wouldn’t get a story… Eventually we realized the truth:
Every champion deserves a story.
Each day, they fight for us on the Fields of Justice. They champion our causes and bring about a peaceful future for Runeterra even in an age when advances in magic have gotten powerful enough to annihilate the entire planet. It’s time they got proper credit. It’s time each one gets their moment to tell their tale in full – within the bounds of the original game universe that means so much more to many of us summoners.
This is the place where the tale of your champion will be told, summoner.
#TL;DR You remember that old lore when Runeterra had an Institute of War and the League of Legends wasn't just the game's name but a thing in the universe? Did you like that story? Well, we're writing one story for every champion that firmly grounds them in that universe in the best way possible - minimizing the changes to old champions whose stories now present them differently after the retcon. You think we can't do it? Think again.
Current progress: 30/139 champions. Combined length: 371 pages. *
*Not all have been released on site yet. Current schedule is for weekly releases. Only 12 are being included in the "initial release" to keep page counts manageable so that we don't bury you with a novel - and instead short serial releases that you can easily manage and enjoy! Have fun.
#Comment, Provide Feedback, and Spread the Word!
I'm planning on updating the LoLCBP site regularly, but I can't reach the masses on my own. If you like what I'm doing with this project and you want to help other people have the same sort of enjoyment or re-experiencing in the context of its original lore, then I need your help.
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Comment! Leave a comment about how much you like what I'm doing on this forum page, so that the topic gets bumped back toward the top. Remember to observe forum Universal Rules (Don't spam to bump it and if for any reason the topic falls inactive for 1 month or greater without posting, don't reactivate as topics that old are considered "dead" on the forums), but your activity on this forum thread will be directly proportional to the number of people who see it! If you have anything to say, say it!
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Provide Feedback! I want the community to take ownership of the lore they want. If you like Riot's new lore better, then you should be posting feedback to their writers on the appropriate places, but this forum thread is about LoLCBP. If you miss the old lore and the way it felt, then I want you to become an active part of the project by telling me what you would like to see me do with it. I want to make this project something we can all enjoy and love, but if I don't know what you're looking for, I can't deliver on those hopes.
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Spread the Word! Tumblr, Facebook, other social media. Post-game lobby when you're chatting with your team about your epic Pentakill. Your friends irl. I want everyone who misses the old lore and who wants a way to put the game - the ENTIRE game of League in its current state - back into that context to have the chance to read my stories and hopefully reestablish the connection with their champions they may have been missing. The more people that hear about my project, the more excited that will make me.
#Final Words and Latest News
As of today, November 14, I am releasing the project. Twelve champion stories are being released as a starting stock for people to get reading right away, but releases will have to be paced. If I dumped all 371 pages of stories that I have currently written (yes, that's my current amount) onto the site, no one would know where to start and everyone would be dumping spoilers for one story in this forum thread as other people (very gradually) got around to reading all of that... assuming people didn't just lose interest at the huge mess of stories thrown up at once unceremoniously.
New stories are scheduled to be released every Friday right now but this may be subject to change.
This serial format should help pace all of you readers and maintain interest in what I hope will become an ongoing project to add lore to the original pre-retcon League of Legends universe, even beyond the culmination of the current goal of one story for every champion. Now, if you read all the above from start to finish and haven't gone to the site yet, it's time you checked out what this is all about on our proper website:
Also, I have posted a news article that summarizes my feelings about this momentous occasion as I unveil this project.
Read the first news update about our site launch here!
-Summoner Maganar