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I think a lot of the worldbuilding in the New Lore is very amateur-ish

Darrosh Jewfist·11/23/2017, 6:12:49 PM·9 votes·629 views

**Disclaimer: **This post isn't meant to say Old Lore is better or New Lore sucks. To me, it's more meaningful to look at the flaws of the (current) New Lore and look at the Old Lore's positive for takeaways, because the New Lore is what we've got. Saying Old Lore sucks because X and New Lore does Y better isn't helpful, at least to me. Old Lore is gone. But looking at what the Old Lore did well and what the New Lore can do better is more important and meaningful. So if you get the feeling I'm bashing the New Lore a lot while cherry-picking the good stuff from the Old Lore, that's exactly the point.

Amateur-ish Worldbuilding I don't know what else to call it but it's a problem I noticed a lot in League lore. I've seen people call it 'name and drop it' worldbuilding. It's basically where Riot narrative writers have this tendency to make up fancy, elaborate names for stuff and then never mention it again.

Compare this passage from the JoJ Vol 1: Issue 01

The sleepy, non-descript village of Kalamanda, located near the northern entrance to Mogron Pass, now finds itself wide awake as the leading lady on the world stage. The village's mayor, Anson Ridley, reported this week that a local survey team has uncovered a massive deposit of gold and precious gems within the village's sphere of influence. Furthermore, two nexuses of considerable magic potency have been discovered alongside the resource deposits.

with these lines from Ahri's and Taric's lore.

Ahri “Care for a gem to match the blue of the skies?” asked the gray-bearded merchant. “For you, I’ll trade a cerulean bauble for the cost of a single cryraven feather, or perhaps the seed of a jubji tree. I’m flexible.”

and

Taric He saw the Alabaster Library engulfed in pitch and flame, and still he dashed into the roiling inferno to retrieve the poetry of Tung. He screamed in rage as the Frostguard ran the last dreamstag off a blind cliff, and then leapt into the abyss himself in a desperate attempt to save it.

In both of these passages, some concepts are being introduced to the reader. In the Journal of Justice, these ideas are important for the reader's understanding to follow the story and are clearly explained. There is no 'name it and drop it' going on. The words, terminology, are explained. You've got a town, Kalamanda, and it's mayor Anson Ridley, and they found nexuses and we know what they are and got a good idea why they're important.

Compare that to Ahri and Taric. The fuck is a cryraven? The fuck is a jubji tree? What the fuck is an Alabaster Library (it sounds Demacian?) and what the fuck is Tung poetry? Is that a guy or a city or a culture or what?

This is why the more modern worldbuilding in Ahri and Taric is very cheap and shallow. It sounds HELLA amateur-ish in my ears because it's no different from a kid going 'oh oh oh, they don't have ravens in my universe they have CRYravens because they... cry? I dunno but the feathers are valuable'. Also note cryravens or jubji tree or Tung poetry don't factor into the story at all. It's unnecessary flourish thrown in to make the world SEEM large and living and vibrant but comes off as very, very weak writing.

I don't like worldbuilding for the sake of throwing in pointless terminology. It's cheap. It's amateur-ish. If you're going to use these terms, at the very least explain it. Preferably, these terms and concepts relate directly to the story and aren't just adjectives tossed it to make stuff seem more 'interesting'.

This leads to the main catalyst for me writing this post: The Targon Region update on the universe page.

https://universe.leagueoflegends.com/en_US/region/mount-targon/

Like, look at it. It's all concept art. It's all just fluff. It's just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding.

I have to emphasize, I don't dislike the specifics. _I dislike where Riot's focus seems to be. _

It seems to me that they're trying so desperately hard to make Runeterra seem like a living, breathing, vibrant world and so they just jam all this cheap and weak worldbuilding fluff into it.

What the Targon update shows me is that their world basically exists in concept art and half-baked ideas. It showed me that instead of creating a grand nattive, a truly strong and epic story for people to latch onto, they're more focused on just designing tiny little details about their world. Don't get me wrong, it's great, but it's super amateur-ish to me in the same sense that kids tend to over-worldbuild and focus on designing all the nitty-itty aspects (pun!) of their world instead of thinking of interesting and relatable characters, engaging plots, or unique interactions between these strong personalities.

Like take this line from the DevBlog 3 years ago.

After a while, these early choices began to create unexpected problems. Every new champion needed a reason to join and remain in the League, and as their number grew, the net result was that over time the world started to feel, well, small, and eventually less interesting.

This quote is really ironic to me, because for a vast majority of League's new lore - it IS uninteresting. So many champions exists in their own little bubbles nearly or completely isolated from any other champion. There's no central storyline to latch them onto. Every champion is grouped pretty damn loosely into 'factions' to simplify champion 'allegiance'? 'Origins'?

Not to mention how many champions got shoehorned into being Vastaya, Darkin, in addition to factions, and how so many champions. I'm thinking Kindred and Kalista who are functionally just gods. Like, outside of the specifics, they're just two godlike beings doing their thing. There's really no difference between them outside of cosmetics (b-b-but Kindred is Wolf + Lamb and K-Kalista is a multitude of souls in a betrayed woman!) - yeah, until that actually plays a role - it's just fluff. One kills people in battle or peacefully and the other kills traitors. Okay?

I just can't imagine these god-like beings fitting into any meaningful story. They're not relatable. They're too distant, too godlike, to care about. I noticed it with Bard when a Rioter explained his thought process was relative to millennia or something and mere mortals like us couldn't possibly fathom it (I'm paraphrasing here). But Zoe continues that tradition of creating champions so foreign to us, they're nigh unrelatable. A Bard centric story could be told well but fundamentally uninteresting. He's a godlike being you can't understand. Okay? How is anyone suppose to like a story told from his POV?

I mean, holy cow, so many secondary characters straight up get murdered in the color stories.

I think this is one thing the Old Lore did better and that's telling a coherent story. The slow build up. The overarching narrative. There was a slow boiling storyline. You can complain about its execution or the specifics, but the overaching idea of a brewing war in Kalamanda and etc was really brilliant. And the worldbuilding came with it. We saw Noxian-Demacian tensions and national rivalry. We saw Swain rise up to High General. That's meaningful worldbuilding with concepts being SHOWN to us rather than explained to us with a pretty picture as a visual aid. We don't see that kind of story from Riot today, at least the only one I can think of is Miss Fortune's story line but even then the delivery was choppy and inconsistent. How are you suppose to know when the next update is? At least with the JoJ it was consistently released.

tl:dr - Riot's worldbuilding is like a 14 year old with millions of dollars invested into concept art.

3 Comments

Kaolla11/23/2017, 6:28:17 PM10 votes

I'll address the "name it and drop it" situation because I am prone to it as well. The problem stems from only having 1200 words or so to tell your story. You really would love to explain that a Cryraven is a northern frost-dwelling breed that is more a minor ice-elemental than an actual avian species. You wish you could convey to the reader how valuable a feather is as a reagent for various hexmagic transmutations. But you simply don't have the space.

You need to tell the reader that this bauble is worth something significant but the merchant thinks isn't too much of a price to part with and you want it to sound more interesting and "worldbuildy" than simply trading it for gold. So you name-drop something and hope that the reader has the ability to gloss over it with enough imagination to put something together for himself. You move on because you have to, not because you intend to cause disservice to the reader

It's a tough sort of cramped space to work in, banging out these lore blurbs. The stories need to be self contained start-to-finish but hint to a far greater world that they're a part of. Unfortunately the story always has to come first which means true worldbuilding will always get sacrificed :(

Kaolla11/23/2017, 11:00:07 PM3 votes

If it was possible I would love for them to adopt a format where they could name drop as LINKS that explained things when you moused over or clicked them. But I fear that would become a convoluted mess to maintain. The internet is not great at creating lasting content.

A situation where we have things *footnote annotated is probably the best sort of compromise. I dunno if they see that sort of format as amateurish though...