Hey man...

Further; unless I deeply misunderstand you, if a product ear-marked as "Core Lore" whose sole goal is to establish the Lore that every other product on the market currently has doesn't surface, League won't ever actually have a functional Lore ever.

We kinda do -- it's called Foundations, and it is a product team, albeit an internal product (the tangible product is the guides and sheets Biolum. was talking about earlier). It didn't -use- to be early on, but it is now. One of the things about Foundations, as I've mentioned before, is it's both writing and visuals. So it's not Narrative, but there are people from Narrative on it, and artists dedicated to it as well. Foundations doesn't write stories for externally facing products, though, but it guides these products through establishing the world and themes; essentially building a playground for other teams to take and develop. I apologize if this answer is confusing. :(

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Then why should I care?

If Riot's going to continue to use this product system, and they're not going to spend time and resources on lore that isn't 'well we have a new thing, so we need lore for it', why should I care about lore? All you guys are doing are treating it like a way to sell things, so why should I treat it as anything else?

Hey, Hellioning,

I realize my post was a wall of text, and written when I was a bit too tired to make clear points, but there are good things in there about lore.

I mentioned an "internal use only reference guide" product - something like what Nastra Dark described as a "Core Lore" - this is the foundation work that is going on, and the 'product' is style and story guides for most of the world. These being internal only sucks, of course, but it means that internal consistency should improve, and future lore shouldn't operate in a vacuum. (Often, someone important floats the idea that they get released as a player-facing thing - it's not been prioritized like that yet, mostly due to the fact that out of the 12 or so I think they're working on, only half are done - and I may be waaaay off on that estimate. It would feel more like a reference guide than a story, however.).

I also mentioned that I worked with artists who were assigned to a less product-oriented department - that department has been incubating all sorts of things for a long time now, but while they get the freedom to try many many things, they do not have a deadline to release a clear product - sort of the opposite of the 'product' system. It means that I personally have no vision on when anything they're working on will get published, or if it never will because it served its purpose internally. A few cinematics have come out of this department, and they are keen to tell stories in different ways.

Events can be lore delivery mechanisms, and are ways of continuing the story of a location or of characters, and those fit within the product system quite happily. Now, you could argue (and others in the comments here have) that the events are subpar, or that they break things they shouldn't do - and that would be a fair value judgement to give. Events are huge deals and take a long time - so iteration is slow. Much like ShadowStorm spurred a conversation about release stories, I could see a thread on what did and didn't go down well with events as an interesting topic. I don't agree with someone here who implied that having skins associated with an event cheapens the event, turning it into an advert - maybe I am too excitable as a human being, but when I get excited about something, I want to own a piece of it. Maybe that means 3d printing a Z-Drive for Ekko (I have done this) or making Bard cupcakes (I have done this) or maybe it means buying a ward skin for the Shurima event (I have done this). Value judgements on the Shurima event notwithstanding.

Lastly, this lack of lore-specific (non-event) products is becoming more and more of an issue internally, which is why I said there were conversations going on. Some people believed that the lore and story given out in champ launch stories, events, and the like was covering the narrative/story requirements (because they do contain some) and thus a dedicated product wasn't needed. Clear, pointed, disagreements, both within and without Riot (hello), are showing that that is not true, and that those forms of story are not sufficient. You could argue that it's been obvious forever that it wouldn't be enough - but when looking at everything that both Rioters and players want more of, and that we want to provide, it could have been quite reasonable to think that, just as players want more champions, players want more story - so ensure each new champion has a bit of story and go! Story based products are becoming more obviously needed, and that just like continual balancing is required to keep a healthy game, so too is a continually enriched Runeterra narrative required to keep a healthy world. It's a shift in how it is thought about.

tl;dr -

• There's an extensive lore guide being worked on,
• There's a team that doesn't follow the product system who create story too,
• Events can be good story delivery mechanisms (there are improvements to make) and
• The winds are shifting internally away from well intentioned misunderstanding about what lore needs.

I am really regretful that I wrote that so late at night, and I know that it did not answer the question given. I suck, and will come back to this to give my opinion on that. (And I can only give my opinion - I can't answer conclusively what I don't know.) I also wish I could answer every one of these replies individually, but I've bunched them into one answer. Sorry.