"He was washed-up and broke when the former general Jericho Swain found him." The Glorious Executioner was, at the lowest point of Riot's biography, an unemployed arena fighter in the drinking halls of the Noxian capital, and the man who came looking for him needed a coup. Draven got his name a few days after that coup, in front of a crowd, with a pair of thrown axes. Everything he is in Runeterra now, the text says, he owes to that applause.
Who they are
He was an orphan on the streets of Basilich, headstrong and full of bravado, and his older brother Darius finished the fights he started; the biography doubts he would have survived childhood otherwise. When Basilich fell to Noxus, a captain named Cyrus took the brothers into the ranks, after Draven had made an ill-considered attempt on his life and impressed him. Darius took to soldiering; Draven found it too much effort for too little glory, and when Darius rose to command a warband, joining it changed nothing. He left, or was pushed out, and sold his skills as a champion and duellist to a succession of warbands during the occupation of Ionia before landing a respectable contract in the Reckoning pits.
The Reckoners had punished criminals and settled disputes between noble houses for centuries, but long wars on many fronts were draining the crowds, and Draven, who wanted riches and adoration, slumped with them into the capital's gambling dens. That is where Swain found him. Swain needed help to depose Grand General Boram Darkwill, and perhaps, the text allows, wanted Draven only to secure Darius's support afterwards. Either way Draven was integral, and stood beside Swain in triumph, smiling for the first time in months.
In the days after, nobles who refused to honour the succession were sentenced to die in the arena. One escaped his handlers. Draven, on instinct, leapt from the high balcony and cut him down mid-flight with two thrown axes, and after a stunned silence the crowd roared. He retrieved the axes, spun them for the stands, and became the Glorious Executioner. A diminutive promoter then proposed combining pit fights with Draven's showmanship, and the Reckoners became entertainers with constructed backstories, styles and personalities, fights still bloody but rarely fatal, rivalries and trash-talk that became legend across the empire. He lived the high life in Swain's new Noxus, reconciled with Darius, and occasionally still marched out to kill enemy champions in single combat. He has everything he imagined, the biography ends, and is restless again, dreaming of the day the whole world knows his name.
Where they belong
Riot places Draven in Noxus, and the biography is the capital's arena from the pits to the balcony, with a childhood in Basilich and a stretch selling his blade in occupied Ionia.
Riot lists two related champions:
- Darius: the older brother who finished his fights, commanded him for a while, and reconciled with him after the coup.
- Swain: the disgraced general who found him broke, used him to depose Darkwill, and gave him the crowd he wanted.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Draven is a quest-giving character whose quests are all the same quest: fight in front of people. The Reckoning arena the biography describes, part punishment, part settlement, now mostly show, is the most obvious structured PvP venue in the lore, and Draven is its face, promoter's dream and champion at once; what a company built on competition would do with that is our reading in Riot MMO PvP. He is also a boss in the narrowest sense, a duel at the top of an arena ladder, which the text says he still wins. He is not a companion; the biography's Draven does nothing he cannot be watched doing. 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 and still fighting. The biography leaves him at the height of his fame, restless.
Who the diminutive promoter is. The text gives no name, and neither do we.