The Institute of War

The Institute of War was a neutral institution that once stood at the center of Runeterra's politics. Rather than let the great nations settle their quarrels through open war, the Institute channeled their disputes onto the Fields of Justice, where champions fought on behalf of the nations that stood behind them. The outcome of that combat, not the clash of armies, decided the matter at hand. In this role the Institute served as the central governing body of the wider world, a neutral ground answerable to no single nation. By binding the great powers to resolve their differences through sanctioned champion combat, it held all-out war between them in check and kept the peace that its arbitration imposed. For as long as it endured, the Fields of Justice stood as the ground where the fate of nations was decided. That era has since passed. The Institute of War was dissolved, and with its dissolution it was removed from the accepted history of Runeterra, belonging now to an older telling of the world's past rather than its present. Defunct and destroyed, it no longer appears among the world's active places, yet its memory survives. It is remembered as the body that once kept the great nations from tearing one another apart, and its legacy lives on in the recollection of that vanished age.