LoL Champions Based on Real Mythology: 10 Picks Lifted Straight From Legend

Runeterra invented its own gods. It also went shopping in ours.

Ten champions you've already met, in a book that's a few thousand years older than League.

Champions Based on Real Mythology

10 Picks Lifted Straight From Legend

Runeterra Lore

Runeterra invented its own gods. It also went shopping in ours.

Ten champions you've already met, in a book that's a few thousand years older than League.

Granted, Riot's writers have built an enormous amount of original mythology, and a lot of it is genuinely good. But the roster didn't arrive from nowhere. Some of these champions are a wink, some are a straight lift with the serial numbers filed off, and one of them kept the original's actual name. Once you start noticing, champion select gets a bit stranger.

#10: Ornn

Every mythology worth the name has a smith. He's antisocial, he lives under a mountain, and everyone else in the story eventually has to come down and ask him for something. Ornn is that character with a Freljordian accent, right down to hammering out gear for people he doesn't especially like.

#9: Volibear

The storm god who solves problems by walking at them is one of the oldest characters there is, and the Freljord's version wears a bear.

The temperament sells it more than the lightning does. He's furious about the modern world, he thinks his own worshippers have gone soft, and he'd rather the whole thing burned down than change. Riot didn't make that part up. That's the oldest gods, exactly as their own myths wrote them.

#8: Diana

They didn't even change the name.

Diana is the Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt, and League's Diana is a moon-blessed warrior who hunts. Her opposite number (Leona) carries a sun disc. It's the most direct borrow on this list and it still hides in plain sight, because everyone reads it as a girl's name rather than as the source material.

#7: Kindred

Death arrives, and it's two things at once. One of them is gentle and gives you the choice; the other one doesn't ask.

Cultures that agree on almost nothing else keep landing on this. Death is a guide who walks you somewhere rather than a monster that eats you, and the mercy and the hunt are the same event seen from different ends. Kindred is that idea given a bow and put in the jungle, and it's a much older idea than the champion.

#6: Renekton

Shurima is Egypt with the filing off, and Renekton is its crocodile god. Ancient Egypt had one of those too (a river god with a crocodile head who was worshipped precisely because he was terrifying and you'd rather he was on your side). The bit Riot added is what happened after: centuries buried alive, going out of his mind. That part's theirs (the crocodile was already taken).

#5: Morgana

Morgan le Fay is the sorceress from the Arthurian stories, and she's a healer or a schemer or the villain of the whole thing (depending on which century you read). Nobody could ever agree on her, and the sources don't agree with each other either.

League kept that. Morgana is the exile, the sister who chose wrong, and the writers have spent years quietly declining to say she's evil. That ambiguity runs through the original character too, and it's the rare case where the borrow includes the argument rather than just the costume.

Her sister is on our list of champions the lore made relatives, which has more of these pairs than you'd expect.

#4: Cassiopeia

She's two myths stapled together, and she's carrying both names' worth of baggage.

The name belongs to a vain queen from Greek legend who got punished for it. The body belongs to the snake-woman whose stare turns you to stone, and Petrifying Gaze [R] is about as subtle a reference as a brick. Riot's contribution is the cause of death: she wasn't cursed by a goddess, she went looking for power in a tomb and found it. Same ending, better motive.

#3: Hecarim

Half man, half horse. The centaur alone would put him on this list.

But the better reference is what he does. All across northern Europe there's a story about a spectral cavalry that comes through at night, and hearing it is a very bad sign, and you don't go outside to look. Hecarim leads exactly that, at exactly that volume, and the sound of him arriving does the same job in a game that the legend did around a fire.

#2: Ahri

The nine-tailed fox spirit runs through Korean, Chinese and Japanese folklore, and the details are remarkably consistent. She takes a human shape (usually a beautiful one). She feeds on people. The tails count her age and her power. And in the versions that stuck, she wants to become properly human and can't quite manage it.

That last part is Ahri's entire character. Riot didn't borrow the look and invent a story to go with it; they took the story too. It's why she's one of the few champions whose lore and whose kit are saying the same thing.

#1: Wukong

He's named after him. Simplest trick there is, and it's still the best one on the list.

Sun Wukong is the Monkey King from a sixteenth-century Chinese novel that most of the planet has read some version of, and he's not a minor character in it. He fights the entire celestial bureaucracy. He has a staff that changes size. He makes copies of himself out of his own hair (a real thing from the book, not something a game designer invented to fill a slot).

League's version keeps the staff, keeps the clone, keeps the mischief, and adds a master to disappoint. Even his internal name in the game files is MonkeyKing (same as the name on his icon file). If you want more of where Runeterra's regions and their gods sit next to each other, the Runeterra lore map lays the whole roster out, and our list of the strongest champions in the lore covers the ones Riot built from scratch.

None of this is a criticism. Borrowing from myth is what myth is for, and the versions that last are the ones that get retold with something new in them. Renekton's madness, Ahri's guilt and Morgana's refusal to be a villain are all additions, and they're the reason those three landed.

Plenty more didn't fit here. Which one did we miss?

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