Shurima in LoL: 10 Things Buried Under the Sand

There is a religion in this desert built entirely around Rammus.

Ten things the lore actually says about Shurima, including what Void names mean and what Skarner is standing in front of.

Shurima in LoL

10 Things Buried Under the Sand

Lore

There is a religion in this desert built entirely around Rammus.

Ten things the lore actually says about Shurima, including what Void names mean and what Skarner is standing in front of.

Shurima gets summarized as the fallen empire with the sun disc, which covers the emperors and skips everyone still living out there. The wiki spends most of its length on those people, and they're the interesting part.

#10: It's the Gold emblem

The Season 9 ranked emblem redesign gave each rank a region. Gold got Shurima (either a compliment or a comment about peaking early).

#9: Void names are ancient Shuriman, and they translate

Kha'Zix means "You Face Yourself". Vel'Koz means "To Understand By Unmaking". Rek'Sai, Cho'Gath and Kog'Maw are all built from the same old language (sai just means desert).

Kai'Sa is the odd one out. Turns out she was Kaisa first and put the apostrophe in herself, to look like the rest of them.

#8: You can hitch a ride on a sandswimmer

Sandswimmers are enormous four-legged animals with narrow bodies and webbed feet that let them swim under the dunes. They eat bugs, they bother nobody, and they follow the same routes over and over.

Scavengers memorize the routes, wait, and jump on. Free transport, as long as you're going wherever the animal was already going.

#7: Some tribes live on the backs of animals, permanently

A Dormun is a huge armored creature that survives the drought by sensing water nobody else can find. Follow one and you don't die of thirst.

Certain nomads went further and just moved in. They've built permanent homes up there, and they earn their keep by cleaning the animal and killing the flying things that come to bite it.

#6: The Rammus cult is real and it's lovely

The Disciples of the Armordillo believe Rammus is a god, or Ascended, or an oracle, and the wiki notes they're the only cult in Shurima with no downside to joining. Once a year the whole membership somersaults through their cities in imitation of him.

Pilgrims wander the desert hoping to find him and ask one question. They know he likes sweets, so they load their caravans with them, and somehow, every so often, a caravan wakes up completely cleaned out.

#5: Azir's army is not alive

The old empire kept ten thousand elite warriors around the emperor. What Azir summoned when he came back looks like them and is made of sand, and the lore is explicit that the constructs aren't sentient.

He does have real human soldiers. There just aren't ten thousand of them.

#4: Skarner is guarding a door

Deep under the wastes there's an entrance to another world, and Skarner defends it. That's the entire entry.

What's on the other side isn't written down anywhere (after this many years, that's starting to look deliberate).

#3: The desert has a section that simply takes people

The Endless Plain runs for hundreds of miles and the wiki's line on it is that few who try to cross are ever seen again. Heat and thirst get most of them.

What gets the rest comes out after dark. Shakkal raiders vault at their victims on bone braces and polearms, other bands camouflage themselves into the terrain and wait, and the entry adds, in passing, that in rare cases they eat what they catch.

#2: Janna is Shuriman

Before Zaun she was Jan'ahrem, a wind spirit whose reach covered the whole continent, and she spent the rise of the Ascended and the Great Darkin War doing what she does now: standing over whoever had the least protection.

She didn't switch sides or get reassigned. The people who needed her most moved, so she went where they went.

#1: The god they invented afterwards is the opposite of the ones they had

Shurima's whole ancient religion was god-emperors on a sun disc, ascension for the chosen few, and everyone else watching.

Belief in the Great Weaver only started after the empire fell, and it's held mostly by nomads and shepherds. She weaves every individual life into one design, and the doctrine's own emphasis is that even the smallest rock matters to the pattern.

A civilization spent centuries insisting greatness was the point. The people left in the sand afterwards came up with a god who says it isn't.

Conclusions

Riot built Shurima out of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, and the name itself points both ways. It sits close to the Akkadian name for Sumer, the first civilization, and equally close to an Ancient Egyptian root meaning empty, dry, or to rise up. Every one of those readings fits the place.

The best thing in the whole article is one line about Rammus: he shows up in front of people at random, usually by accident, usually because he's looking for food. Nobody can agree whether he's a god, a guardian or a sign that things are about to change. He's not telling.

Related reading: who in Runeterra could end the world, champions who never stayed dead, and the Runeterra lore map for where all of this sits.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.