“I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.”
At this point in the story, Demacia has marched into Shurima and attacked Zaun’s pyrikhos mines, acting in order to stop a prophesied Void apocalypse. This drastic measure, in violation of the League’s peace edict, has triggered one of the largest battles in recent Runeterran history. We held a round of special Featured Matches this weekend, which influenced the course of the battle.
There is lots more story to come on this point, including what I think will be a pretty cool lore event.
For now, here’s a quick summary of what happened.
- We rolled to decide whether or not Ceruleana was right. There were a variety of possibilities. We landed in the absolute worst quadrant: “immediate” for timing, with a magnitude of “apocalyptic”.
- Demacia demanded that Zaun turn over the mines, though it had no evidence to present other than the word of Ceruleana. Zaun refused, and the attack began.
- Zaun attempted to send reinforcements via warpgate, triggering hexplosive pyrikhos charges planted by a Piltovian saboteur. The blast overloaded the gate’s warp matrix and disabled it.
- Malzahar summoned an enormous swarm of Voidlings from within the mine, and sent them to destroy the attacking Demacian army.
- With air support from Piltover’s airship armada and the Screaming Yipsnakes, Demacia broke through Zaun’s fortifications, destroyed the Voidlings, and seized the mines. They began to exorcise the Void from the pyrikhos within, and fought to close the opening Void rift.
- Zaun reactivated the warpgate and deployed HexKorps reinforcements to retake the mine.
- Swain, having put down the Noxian rebels, led the legions of Noxus into battle against Demacia, their hated foe.
- Demacia was forced to abandon the mine before they could close the rift, suffering terrible losses against the combined Noxian/Zaunite force.
- As the broken Demacian army fled, Zaun regained control of the mines.
- Malzahar burst into maniacal laughter as he tore the rift fully open and brought forth the horrors of the Void. The demons immediately set upon Noxus and Zaun. Across Valoran, the skies darkened as the prophesied apocalypse began.
In other words: Ceruleana was right, and Demacia failed.
So where does that leave us?
- Malzahar has (obviously) left Zaun’s roster, to pursue an exciting career at the head of a Void swarm.
- Demacia took massive losses: about two-thirds of its army. Piltover and Bandle City were routed and forced into retreat, though their losses were not so grievous.
- Zaun and Noxus are caught in the middle of an opening Void rift. We’ll resolve that battle later. Demacia, Piltover, and Bandle City might be given a choice as to whether they help fight back the Voidling swarms and get to the opening portal, or leave Zaun and Noxus to their “just deserts”.
- Assuming they win, Zaun will have a decision to make about what to do with this impending apocalypse. The current plan is to give them the following options:
- Do nothing and let the Voidpocalypse begin.
- Try to control the Void rifts, directing the damage to specific factions. Very, very risky.
- Try to close the portal and stop the apocalypse using their mastery of Extradimensional Theory, leaving the pyrikhos in the mines intact. Somewhat risky.
- Let Demacia use its holy magic to destroy the portal and close the rift. This would render the pyrikhos in the mines inert, though the rest of the pyrikhos (including in Field 14) would not be affected. Virtually guaranteed to close the portal.
- The arc will probably be ending in the next couple of weeks. I’ll post on that topic later. I’d like to see how this event plays out before moving on to the details of the conclusion.
Anyway, there’s definitely more to come, but I wanted to give a general preview. I’m thinking we might have a special set of Featured Matches this weekend for the battle between Zaun and the Void.
—CupcakeTrap
P.S.: If you want to see the gory details, here’s the GDoc with all the dice rolls. This was the first real use of the military system we devised for this arc. As I’ll mention later, I think that both the greatest strength of this arc and its greatest flaw has been the number of novel, quirky mechanics, like the military and research systems. I’m planning on an extra-long intermission period between the end of this storyline and the start of the next, during which time we can talk as a community about what worked and what didn’t, and what needs to change. At the end of the day, I want to stress: all this dice-rolling and detail is just a tool, a means to help add some structure (and some unpredictability) to the story. As such, the lore team and I are likely going to nudge and tilt system-generated outcomes to make for a better, more engaging story.
Caitlyn, you monster.
FACTIONS 
[…] The Battle of Shurima […]
[…] I apologize for some projects not having art; I’ll put that together as soon as I can, but I’m prioritizing some other things, like figuring out whether or not the world ends. […]
[…] vs. the Void matches this Saturday, July 5. These matches will influence the conclusion of the Battle of Shurima. They will be immediately preceded by Update 9: The HexKorps, once it’s […]
After some time spent thinking,I admit Demacia’s actions were a bit too extreme,but now,we have to deal with the void invasion.
[…] In direct violation of the League’s mandate, Demacia (joined by Piltover and Bandle City) marched into Shurima and seized the mines by force. Zaun launched a counterattack, backed by Noxian reinforcements. It retook the mines and routed the […]
We have our warpgate, and can likely escape if worst comes to worst, but Demacia is still in the process of retreating. Wouldn’t it be easy for the Voidlings to capture up to and slaughter the retreating Demacian’s were we to leave? And also, after the first round, wouldn’t the OP League Summoners be showing up, since we beat Demacia 1 round early?
you guys have to get to your warpgate too and im pretty sure that giant death robots are not the fastest thing in the world. And i assume malzahar ripped the rift open after the demacian army left and zaun got back into the mines
Now is no time to retreat. We will break this invasion before it can begin. Having crushed both the mighty ‘Grand Alliance’ and the first wave of the second Void War, none will be able to doubt our military nor the genius of its developers.
Retreating would basically entail giving up all of zaun to the void. It would be worse than what Noxus went through in the third arc.
Where you gonna run to? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4ovLrvq2do
More seriously: there’s no obvious avenue of retreat, and it’s pretty clear that their best shot is stopping this thing now before the portal fully opens. It looks to be much, much worse than what happened in Discord.
I think it would be best for everyone if Zaun used their knowledge of Extradimensional Theory to close the rifts, instead of trying to control it. This way Zaun gets to keep their mines, and hopefully the apocalypse can be averted before it can do any real damage.
Zaun put Runeterra at risk with their unsafe experimentations.The League should punish them for causing a void invasion (if we survive that invasion).
And you put Runeterra at risk by practically creating WW3 before the true threat arrived. Did you declare war against BC for them triggering an undead invasion? Huh, that’s strange. That’s just some bias right there.
BoomGod, I have to agree with Wizard here. You yourselves acknowledged that there was a chance that your new goddess could be wrong, and that we might not cause the viodpocolypse. However, you decided that Zaun’s mines had to be wiped out, instead of discussing your concers rationally. Because of this, an argument could be made that the void rift tore open because of your fighting. Therefore, Demacia is at least partially responsible for this catastrophe.
This would certainly be the case were we unable to defeat the void and seal the portal with our own power. With Demacia’s might shattered due to their reckless impatience and blind assumption that Zaun would stand idle while the world burns, the task should fall to the only people now prepared to act. We are the heroes of this story.
heroes? more like hypocrites. between mass murder of innocent civilians in piltover’s bombing, and attemping to essentially strip away everything sacred to Bandle if not enslave them outright, Zaun can take that self-righteous attitude and shove it. I vote going back and fighting the void, but only because there are bigger problems at stake here.
Would have replied directly to Rick, but the reply button didn’t pop up on his comment for some reason. You can’t just accuse Zaun of mass murder of innocents when BC did literally the same thing to us in an act of sabotage, and we didn’t even attack you guys! The first deal for the undead may have been unfair, but we thought that Demacia was going to try to stay on Cerulena’s good side and not get involved there. We had no wish to outright enslave BC, since we have been in need of true allies for a long time. There is a reason we will always turn to Noxus, and that is because they are the only ones willing to accept us in the slightest. At least we all agree the void threat is a major problem that must be dealt with swiftly before it gets out of control and threatens to consume even us.
Zaun has stated before, the purpose of our research and indeed the purpose of everything we have done is to gain the strength to prevent just such an apocalypse. Now is the time for Zaun to use its hard-fought understanding of our enemy and its tools to save the world, let the other nations watch.
Demacia could have said something about it instead of losing their shit and invading. Also, where is the league summoners? They should have shown up by the end of the third battle.
We actually never reached the third round of the battle; Zaun and Noxus broke the Demacian army in the second round. Noxus has a lot of pent up anger issues.
My thinking is that Demacia did say something about it, but the mining authorities weren’t going to listen. Once the battle was met, and the Voidlings started swarming out, and Malzahar started cackling maniacally, and the skies turned dark … maybe by that point Zaun was willing to talk. Hence the upcoming lore event.
Way to go, Team Jerkface!