Thirteen. That is the number of regions on Riot's Universe site, each with its own page, its own overview and its own roster of champions. It is also not the number you get from Riot's painted map, which shows ten, or from most fan guides, which say twelve. All three counts come from Riot's own material, and the difference is not an error. It is a fact about what kind of place three of the regions are.
Why the count varies
The interactive map at map.leagueoflegends.com paints ten regions onto the world: Bilgewater, Demacia, the Freljord, Ionia, Ixtal, Noxus, Piltover and Zaun as one, the Shadow Isles, Shurima and Targon. Piltover and Zaun are one city vertically divided, so the map treats them as one area. Bandle City is absent because it is not on the material plane; the Yordles' home lies between the physical world and the spirit realm and appears only when it chooses. The Void is absent because it is not a place at all but a force, with a doorway in the ruins of Icathia.
Universe splits Piltover from Zaun, because they have separate cultures, governments and champion rosters, and gives Bandle City and the Void pages of their own, because they have peoples, histories and champions even without coordinates. Twelve is what you get by splitting Piltover and Zaun but leaving out the Void. Thirteen is Riot's fullest list, and it is the one this site uses.
The thirteen, in Riot's numbers
Champion counts are from Riot's faction pages. Illustration counts are the number of Legends of Runeterra cards assigned to each region in Riot's card data, which is the best measure of how much official art a region has.
| Region | Champions | Illustrations | On the painted map |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ionia | 23 | 230 | Yes |
| Noxus | 17 | 214 | Yes |
| Demacia | 16 | 185 | Yes |
| The Freljord | 15 | 195 | Yes |
| Zaun | 14 | 222, shared with Piltover | Yes, with Piltover |
| Shurima | 11 | 238 | Yes |
| The Shadow Isles | 10 | 217 | Yes |
| Bilgewater | 9 | 221 | Yes |
| The Void | 9 | 0 | No |
| Bandle City | 8 | 239 | No |
| Ixtal | 8 | 0 | Yes |
| Piltover | 8 | 222, shared with Zaun | Yes, with Zaun |
| Targon | 8 | 222 | Yes |
| No region | 17 | 31 |
The rosters hold 156 champions. The remaining seventeen belong to no region on Riot's pages: Ryze, Bard, Kindred, Jax, Senna, Nocturne, Zilean, Aatrox and others whose stories cross borders or predate them.
What the numbers say
Ionia is the largest region by a distance, and with Noxus, its invader, makes up nearly a quarter of the roster. Any story Riot tells at scale has those two at its centre, which is why the invasion of Ionia is the most usable conflict in the setting for a game that needs two sides.
Bandle City has more official illustrations than any other region and no place on the map. That is the Yordles' whole situation in one line: an enormous amount of affection, and no fixed address.
Ixtal and the Void have no illustrations at all, because Legends of Runeterra never added them. They are the two regions Riot would have to draw from nothing for the MMO, and, not coincidentally, the two with the most room for the designers to decide what they look like.
Seventeen champions have no home. For a card game that is a footnote; for a world you walk through it is a design problem, because Ryze, Bard and Kindred have to be somewhere when the player arrives.
Where they are
Valoran, the northern continent, holds most of them. The Freljord takes the north. Demacia sits in the west and Noxus in the centre and east, with the lands between them the usual battlefield. Piltover and Zaun stand on the strait at Valoran's southern tip, where the continent nearly touches Shurima. Targon rises in the mountains of the far south-west. Ionia is a separate archipelago to the east, across a sea. Bilgewater is a port city in the island chain south-east of Ionia, and the Shadow Isles lie further out in the same direction, where nobody sails on purpose.
Shurima is the southern continent: desert in the north and centre, with Ixtal's jungle in its east, and the ruins of Icathia, the Void's doorway, in the far south-east.
Riot's map also names smaller places without regions of their own, among them Camavor, the vanished kingdom whose king caused the Ruination, and Kathkan, of which nothing has been published beyond the name.
Which of them the MMO will hold
Before its 2024 reset, coverage of the Riot MMO named nearly every region above as a place the game would eventually reach, and Camavor and Kathkan besides. None of that has been repeated since the reset, and no MMO launches with thirteen regions; the order in which they arrive is one of the decisions Riot has not announced. We keep the list of what is and is not known in everything we actually know about the Riot MMO, and the case for which peoples a player could belong to in playable races.
For each region in a sentence, and the history that connects them, the one-page version is what is Runeterra?. For the order to read Riot's own material about them, see where to start with Runeterra, from zero.