Factions: A community game mode using rosters based on the nations of Valoran.
Is Factions "Story & Art"? Community Creations? Maps & Modes? I think a case can be made for all three of these options. I figured I'd give Story & Art a try today. While Factions does follow its own continuity, the overwhelming majority of material is from the canonical Runeterra and established lore, and it is fundamentally an exploration of Runeterra. We spend a positively stupid amount of time digging through Riot's lore archives trying to patch things together and work out what happened when in the canonical timeline.
I tend to write overly long posts. I'll keep this one brief.
The basic idea of Factions:
- We use a poll to come up with a set of (usually) three or four factions.
- We come up with something they might be fighting over.
- We run matches as custom games, using faction-specific Champion lists. This creates some interesting strategic puzzles, because these constrained rosters have distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
- We use the match outcomes to determine the course of the story.
- We organize this into storylines that run for about three months.
Sign up for a faction here. All skill levels are welcome. We do this in roughly three-month "arcs", rotating through which factions are playable. You don't have to stick with the same faction through every arc: you can fight for Piltover this time, Noxus next time, Bandle City after that, or whatever you like.
The current storyline, Lines in the Sand, begins in 25 CLE when Azir raises the Sun Disc and proclaims a new Shuriman Empire. War breaks out in Shurima, and the League frantically tries to contain the fighting and maintain the balance of power. Fighting on and off the Fields will determine how this new chapter in Runeterra's history plays out.
Three factions are playable in this arc:
- Shurima rallies behind Emperor Azir to throw off millennia of oppression by Valoran's great powers and the League…but divisions within Azir's court threaten to tear it apart from the inside. Turns out you really shouldn't leave Renekton and Xerath in the same building for very long. Also, some modern Shurimans think this whole "democracy" thing sounds better than "rule by an immortal god-emperor who got everyone killed two thousand years ago".
- Noxus is eager to meet this new "Emperor" on the battlefield, and to discover if he has what it takes to survive in the modern world. It aims to either find a new ally against Demacia or else to tear Shurima apart and take its ancient power for itself. Meanwhile, tensions rise between the aristocratic traditionalists (such as the members of House DuCouteau) and Swain's "New Noxus".
- Piltover has learned the hard way that it cannot rely on Demacia to contain Noxus. The City of Progress has turned its prodigious talents toward the construction of a hextech-powered "New Model Army", and seeks to "civilize" Shurima with technological and social development. Its efforts are centered around a high-speed railway being built through Shurima.
Factions is currently running in NA and EUW. If you'd like to organize matches on your own server, let us know and we're happy to help.
Factions is purely a creation of the community. Although some Rioters have participated in matches, Factions is volunteer-run, and has no affiliation with Riot Games. Factions began about two years ago; I was writing up a "rito pls" post asking for a game mode similar to their original Noxus versus Ionia tournament, and then stopped to ask myself, "how hard would this be to just do ourselves?" The answer turned out to be "actually pretty hard", but it's been worth it.
