Piltover is a thriving, progressive city whose power and influence is on the rise. It is Valoran’s cultural center, where art, craftsmanship, trade and innovation walk hand in hand. Its power comes not through military might, but the engines of commerce and forward thinking.
The ancient city of Zaun was a northern Shuriman trading post, but it was the creation of Piltover’s sea-gates more than three thousand years later that brought even greater prosperity.
The construction of these sea-gates made Piltover a hub of mercantile trade between Valoran and
Shurima, bringing unimaginable wealth to the city’s rulers.
as arching bridges span the chasms between the clifftops.
Piltover’s newer structures are graceful mixtures of polished marble, latticework bronze and shimmering glass that sit alongside older building of hewn stone and weathered timber. Fluted towers inlaid with gold and silver reach for the clear skies,
The entrances to mercantile buildings are often incredibly elaborate. Even those dwellings that predate hextech have since been ornamented with elaborate details to further reinforce the impression that Piltover is a city drowning in gold.
ayce is a brilliant inventor who has pledged his life to the defense of Piltover and its unyielding pursuit of progress. With his transforming hextech hammer in hand, Jayce uses his strength, courage, and considerable intelligence to protect his hometown. While revered throughout the city as a hero, he hasn’t taken well to the attention it brings.
A native son of Piltover, Jayce was raised to believe in the principles that made the city great: Invention. Discovery. Not going to Zaun if you could help it. With a knack for understanding machinery, Jayce earned the honor of being the youngest apprenta to ever be offered patronage by Clan Giopara, one of Piltover’s most respected ruling clans. Utterly unsurprised, Jayce took the offer, and spent most of his early years constructing potential hextech devices and designing transformable multi-tools for Piltover’s working class: a wrench that transformed into a prybar, a pickaxe that could morph into a shovel, a hammer that could turn into a demolition beam, if only it had a sufficiently powerful battery. Everything Jayce touched put his contemporaries to shame.
Most things came easy to Jayce, and he could never understand why his peers had so much trouble with what, to him, were simple concepts. As a result, nearly everyone who worked alongside Jayce found him arrogant, dismissive, and unwilling to slow his pace to help his colleagues catch up. As time went on, his patience became shorter, while at the same time, a chasm grew between decorum, charm, and Jayce’s natural demeanor.
“Picking a fight with me is the dumbest thing you’ve done today – and that’s saying a lot.”
Born to a wealthy and influential family of hextech artificers, Caitlyn swiftly learned the social graces of life in Piltover, but preferred to spend her time in the wilder lands outside it.
Caitlyn’s greatest assets were her intelligence and willingness to learn from her parents, who reinforced her understanding of right and wrong. Though the family’s engineering skills had made them wealthy, her mother always warned of Piltover’s seductions, and its gilded promises that could harden the At first, Caitlyn paid little heed—to her, Piltover was a place of beauty and order that she cherished after each trip into the wild.
Caitlyn has since become a highly respected officer within the ranks of the Piltover Wardens, maintaining order in the City of Progress. She recently partnered with a new recruit from Zaun, the brash and reckless Vi. How such an unlikely pairing came about—and been proven so effective—is the subject of wild rumor and tavern speculation among their fellow Wardens, as well as those they haul away to jail.
“To be the best hunter, you have to be able to think like your prey.”
Vi remembers little of her childhood in Zaun, and what she does remember, she wishes she didn’t. Running with the sumpsnipe gangs, she quickly learned to use her wits, as well as her fists, to survive. Everyone who encountered Vi knew she could talk—or punch— her way out of trouble. More often than not, she chose the latter.
With her wild pink hair, she became a distinctive sight on the streets of Zaun—hightailing from angry shopkeepers in the boundary markets, swaggering through the colorful bazaars of the Black Lanes, or hitching rides up into Piltover aboard the hexdraulic conveyors. Wherever there was a scrape to be gotten into or a scam to be run, Vi was in the thick of it, though she never stole from those that couldn’t cover the loss… and never hurt those that didn’t deserve it.
“We can either do this the hard way or… Oh wait, no. There’s just the hard way.”
Zaun is a large, undercity district, lying in the deep canyons and valleys threading Piltover. What light reaches below is filtered through fumes leaking from the tangles of corroded pipework and reflected from the stained glass of its industrial architecture.
Unfettered development of volatile technologies and reckless industry has rendered whole swathes of Zaun polluted and dangerous.
More than three thousand years ago, a port was founded in the isthmus in the would-be present location of Zaun. It would later become part of the ancient Shurima Crest icon Shurima empire. It is unclear if the name of mercantile city was Kha’Zhun or Osha Va’Zaun, but over time the name was changed to Zaun.
While known to be a notoriously self-centered people by other nations, the denizens of Zaun collectively take great pride in themselves and their city. To them, their right to do as they please is what makes Zaun the freest city in Runeterra. As a result, the streets of Zaun are a constant hive of activity. Shopkeepers with a variety of eccentric items can be found at every corner of the city, with the dark and seedy alleys overflowing with ambitious individuals willing to give their all for a profit. It’s also said that corporate rivalry is the very spirit of competition that defines Zaun as a citystate. Nevertheless, both espionage and sabotage are considered common practices when doing business with Zaunites.
The most important location of all of Zaun and Piltover, it was the epicenter of a massive man made geological disaster that sunk most of old Zaun. Currently, it is the location of massive spires jutting upwards towards Piltover as an arrogant testimony to Zaun’s resolve to survive. One such building is the College of Techmaturgy. The Sun Gates are built above The Cliff.
“polluted underground city.”
The herald of a new age of technology, Viktor has devoted his life to the advancement of humankind. An idealist who seeks to lift the people of Zaun to a new level of understanding, he believes that only by embracing a glorious evolution of technology can humanity’s full potential be realized. With a body augmented by steel and science, Viktor is zealous in his pursuit of this bright future.
Viktor was born in Zaun on the borders of the Entresol level, and, encouraged by his artisan parents, discovered a passion for invention and building. He devoted every waking minute to his studies, hating to interrupt his work even to eat or sleep.
In a bid to impose a level of order and certainty on his world, Viktor researched Zaun’s many accidents and came to realize that almost all of them were the result of human error, not mechanical failure. He offered his services to the local businesses, developing inventions that made them far safer working environments.
“A mechanized heart never misses a beat, and never falters with emotion. So why would anyone trust their life to a fragile muscle of flesh and blood?”
While most look at Jinx and see only a mad woman wielding an array of dangerous weapons, a few remember her as a relatively innocent girl from Zaun—a tinkerer with big ideas who never quite fit in. No one knows for certain what happened to turn that sweet young child into a wildcard, infamous for her wanton acts of destruction.
Though this unknown troublemaker’s targets seemed random, and her motivation nothing more than pure chaos, her actions always served to bring the city’s orderly bustle to a screeching halt. Jinx’s bombastic spree seemed endless, with the wardens’ attempts to catch the culprit thwarted at every turn. She began tagging her works of destruction with vivid graffiti, and other taunting messages directed at the city sheriff’s newest ally in the fight against crime, Enforcer Vi.
“Volatile explosives are a girl’s best friend!”
prodigy from the rough streets of Zaun, Ekko manipulates time to twist any situation to his advantage. Using his own invention, the Z-Drive, he explores the branching possibilities of reality to craft the perfect moment. Though he revels in this freedom, when there’s a threat to his friends, he’ll do anything to defend them. To outsiders, Ekko seems to achieve the impossible the first time, every time.
“My devices work best when they don’t work as intended… which is most of the time.”