The developers from Riot Games have published a new blog post to provide League of Legends players with some new details about Rell, a tanky support Champion.
When the team had just started working on Rell, they had two things to go off of: tanky support with a darker past and personality than Braum. Riot’s concept artist Justin Albers explored a few different options for the character and the team grew attached to the concept of metal bending.
According to the devs, when darkness, strength, and armor are involved, there’s one area of Runeterra that just really works: Noxus. And Rell provides an opportunity to explore its dark side:
“The Black Rose, who run Noxus’ clandestine operations, are interested in some horrible things to further the empire’s expansion and power,” explains narrative lead Jared “Carnival Knights” Rosen. “Demon calling, Void magic, resurrecting and controlling dead gods… A little of this, a little of that. And one of the things this group of crappy 1000-year-old aristocrats have discovered is sigil magic, which has the ability to rip the magic out of living things and then forcibly put it into someone else.”
Rell was born to an agent of The Black Rose and a ranking Noxian soldier. The child possesses an incredibly rare form of ferromancy or metal manipulation that landed her in an academy for magically gifted kids to be forged into a weapon for Noxus. She spent years forced to fight other students and, as she bested them and grew incredibly powerful, they began to disappear. Torn from her life, just as the instructors tore the magic from their bodies and implanted it into Rell, their ultimate weapon.
But Rell never signed up for this. She doesn’t want to fight her friends, the only ones who ever showed her compassion and love. And once Rell finds out she’s been lied to and forced into harming others… She’s furious at everyone and everything. And she tears the entire place down.
“Anger is such a hard emotion to empathize with, and we wanted to make sure players could understand where Rell was coming from. All of the pain she’s gone through, the heartbreak,” says narrative editor Elan “Qulani” Stimmel. “It’s also one of the reasons we decided to make Rell young—it’s much easier to understand and relate to a young person’s fury. Most teenagers are filled with angst, and that’s without discovering their life has been fueled by lies.”
This is where we meet Rell. She’s free from the facility. The Black Rose got what they wanted. Noxus’ greatest weapon is finally unleashed.
Check out the official blog post to find out more about Rell: her abilities, form-swapping, VFX and everything else shared by the team.
