Zones of Runeterra
The thirteen zones that make up the world of Runeterra.
About zones of runeterra
Runeterra is divided into thirteen zones, and almost everything in the archive belongs to one of them. Demacia and Noxus are the two great powers; Ionia, Shurima, the Freljord, Bilgewater, Piltover, Zaun, Ixtal, Targon, Bandle City, the Shadow Isles and the Void are the rest — some nations, some conditions, one of them not a place at all.
The zones are the single most useful index into this world. A character belongs to a zone before they belong to a story, conflicts are almost always between two of them, and the magic, architecture, food and law all change at the borders.
Each zone has its own page gathering the champions, factions, locations and stories that belong to it, and the zone galleries hold the concept art that establishes what each one looks like.
The thirteen are not equivalent. Some are nations with borders and governments, some are conditions — the Shadow Isles are a curse that happens to have a coastline, and the Void is not a place on the map so much as a pressure against it. Treating them as a uniform list is the commonest misreading of this world.
Zones are also the unit the MMO will have to ship in. Whatever Riot builds first, it will be one of these, with the history, factions and grievances already written — which is why the zone pages gather champions, locations and stories together rather than keeping them in separate indexes.
How this index is filed
Every entry below is a work Riot published, linked to the original rather than summarised. The list is filtered the same way the rest of the Archive is: champion spotlights, cosmetic adverts, tournament recordings and storefront promos are filed out, so a search for zones of runeterra returns zones of runeterra and not a battle-pass trailer that happens to carry the same tag. What you see is the filtered set, not everything the database holds.
Each work is also filed by the zone it belongs to and placed on the in-world timeline, so the same entry can be reached three ways — by form here, by place from the zone pages, and by date from the timeline. Ordering here is by publication, newest first, which is the order Riot released them rather than the order they happen in.
The rest of the Archive
The archive is one set of works cut several ways. Zones of Runeterra is one form; the indexes below hold the others, and every entry in all of them is filed by zone and placed on the in-world timeline.
The Archive of Runeterra is the full index, the timeline puts it in in-world order, and the codex wings describe the world these works are set in rather than the works themselves.