Zaun in LoL: 10 Things the Undercity Actually Runs On

Piltover and Zaun throw the same festival on the same day and mean opposite things by it.

Ten things the lore actually says about Zaun, including what the kids do to prove themselves.

Zaun in LoL

10 Things the Undercity Actually Runs On

Lore

Piltover and Zaun throw the same festival on the same day and mean opposite things by it.

Ten things the lore actually says about Zaun, including what the kids do to prove themselves.

Zaun usually gets described as the poisoned half of a pair, which is the Piltover version of events. The wiki spends most of its length on how the place works, and it works better than the sales pitch suggests.

#10: The name means fence

Zaun is the German word for fence (from a root that also gives English town and down). It used to be called Oshra Va'Zaun.

#9: There isn't a border, there's an altitude

Zaun's Promenade Level sits level with Piltover's lower districts. Same height, different architecture, and the wiki's line is that nobody could confuse them.

The overlap is the Boundary Markets (the most cosmopolitan part of either city), where wealthy Zaunites shop and Piltovans go for a cheap night out.

#8: The elevator is a monument

The Rising Howl spans the entire city from the Sump to the Boundary Markets on three structural beams (all glass and baroque ironwork), with a wrought-iron wolf and a set of steam whistles at the top. Conductors shout through speaking tubes into a bell to be heard.

There are private ones too, for chem-barons and rich Piltovans who'd rather not share.

#7: The children's rite of passage is riding on the roof of it

Zaunite kids have set their own entry requirements, and there are three ways in. Ride the top of the Rising Howl to the top of Old Hungry with all your limbs still attached. Pick a chem-baron attendant's pocket. Or play knock-and-run on a stilt-walking sump-scrapper.

Do one and you're one of the big kids.

#6: Somebody has to unblock the pipes

When the sludge backs up, chem-jacks go in with canker-spars and clear it. Armored faceplates aren't optional.

Every almshouse in Zaun already has its share of chem-jacks who came back blinded and burned.

#5: It has enough slang to need a glossary

Hours are bells, so eight bells is eight o'clock. Orphans are foundlings. Long-term chemical damage is being chem-burnt or chem-stunted. Go pound a sump is an insult.

And the one that tells you the most about the place: the first rule of the Sump is that only marks go in through the front door.

#4: There's a church that considers your body the problem

The Church of the Glorious Evolved believes that flesh is inferior to steel and that techmaturgy exists to remove its weakness. It takes in the dying, on the reasoning that cutting away failing flesh is the start of the transformation rather than the end of a life. It's popular on both sides of the divide.

Its members treat Viktor as a messiah. Viktor regards the whole thing as an aberration and as further evidence that belief should be kept away from anything that can't be proven.

#3: Zaun gives something up every year on purpose

There's an old tradition of sacrificing something personal on Progress Day so the next version of whatever is being built comes out better. It goes back to when the city genuinely had to rebuild itself.

Nobody up top is required to give anything up. That part only runs downstairs.

#2: The same date is a party and a funeral

In Piltover, Progress Day marks the Sun Gates opening, the moment trade started crossing Valoran freely and the tax on it turned a trickle of gold into a river.

In Zaun the same day is Remembrance Day, for everyone killed in the upheaval that opened that passage and put entire districts underwater. One city celebrates the event. The other counts the bodies from it. Nobody moved the date.

#1: The most important place in both cities is a hole

The Cliff is where the man-made geological disaster happened, and it sank most of old Zaun. The Sun Gates were then built directly above it, so Piltover's fortune is standing on the crater.

Zaun's answer was architectural. It put up enormous spires out of the wreckage, climbing back toward Piltover, and the wiki calls them an arrogant testimony to Zaun's resolve to survive. The College of Techmaturgy is one of them.

They didn't rebuild somewhere safer. They rebuilt upward, where it could be seen.

Conclusions

Zaunites are described by everyone else as self-centered, and they'd take that as a compliment. Their own position is that the right to do whatever they like is exactly what makes Zaun the freest city in Runeterra, and it's hard to argue while standing next to the alternative up the cliff.

My favorite thing down there is an economy. Whumps are raccoon-ish rodents that survive the toxic sewers, and there's an underground trade where they go collect puffcap mushrooms and bring them back to be sold on. They do it because they like puffcaps roughly as much as they like cheese. (A group of them is a clump.)

Related reading: who in Runeterra could end the world, the creepiest designs in the game, 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.