"Misreading the words on his own uniform, he began to assume a new name and new profession for himself." Riot's biography of the Madman of Zaun is a story about a restraining jacket that looked, to a ruined mind, like a doctor's coat. The man who read it had been a chem-baron's enforcer; the asylum his boss put him in for a lesson took his memory and gave him muscle, and what came out of Osweld Asylum with a bonesaw believes it is helping. Runeterra's undercity has many monsters. This one goes looking for patients.
Who they are
His real name is lost, the text says, to both time and memory. He was an enforcer for one of Zaun's most powerful chem-barons, and an oddly good-natured one, quick with a nickname and a clap on the back and blissfully unaware of whose toes he was standing on. Eventually he stood on his boss's. To make an example of him, the baron had him committed to Osweld Asylum, a place known for inhumane treatment and questionable cures, and watched with satisfaction as he was strapped down and dragged to its most secure cell.
Months of horror followed. Experimental treatments with no regard for the patient: nerves prodded, lobes severed, unproved medicines in large doses. His frame gained muscle by the day; his brain lost everything. With no memory of his old life, he tried to make sense of the place, looked down at his restraining jacket, saw something like the white coats around him, and misread the words on it. He must be a doctor too, he reasoned, or why would he be here, and everyone else must be his patient.
When the baron came to collect him, the lobby was empty and the halls silent except for babbling from a room at the end. Inside were bodies, staff and patients alike, dismembered past recognition, and standing over them a hulking purple thing with a lolling blue tongue, muscles bulging out of undersized clothes and a surgical saw in its fist. The baron recognised his enforcer. The enforcer recognised only another patient. The baron's chem-tech pistol tore a hole through him, and new muscle closed it in a moment; the creature looked at him, said "You sick. Need help!", strapped him to a gurney, and operated in imitation of everything the asylum's practitioners had done to him. The surgery, like all his surgeries, was not a success. He added the remains to the pile, sad that he could not save the man, and went out into the streets to find more patients, because Zaun was full of sick people.
Where they belong
Riot places Dr. Mundo in Zaun, and the biography is Zaun throughout: a chem-baron's payroll, Osweld Asylum, and the streets he now walks with a saw.
Riot lists one related champion:
- Ekko: not named in Dr. Mundo's biography, which names nobody at all, its own subject included.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Dr. Mundo is a boss, and the biography has already built the dungeon: an asylum with empty wards, a pile in the last room, and a creature at the end that closes every wound you give it. Regeneration is the mechanic the text states outright, and the tone, a monster that thinks it is curing you, is one no other champion offers. He cannot be a quest-giver; he has no memory, no goal beyond the next patient, and no language beyond a few words. The one design risk is that the lore makes him pitiable, a man who was tortured into this, and a game that plays him as a joke will be arguing with its own source. Whether any champion is playable is the question in will champions be playable.
What we do not know
Whether the game's era, the open question in when is the Riot MMO set?, finds him alive. The text says his flesh regrows over a pistol shot, and gives no date for the asylum.
What his name was. The biography says it is lost, and does not pretend otherwise.