Path of Exile outlines the lore of the Synthesis League and how it made it into the challenges

It’d be easy to think of Path of Exile as having a whole lot of fun systems and having only the most cursory references to any sort of lore, but that’s not the case at all. The Synthesis League featured some very interesting lore for players who paid attention, for example, and thus the latest post on the official site can go into detail about how that lore came into being. While the initial genesis for the League was very much based on the game aspect of dissolving landscapes, the use of memory shards and the subsequent lore was still an involved process.

For example, coming fresh off of Betrayal, the developers knew that there was space for about one or two sentences of narration to avoid any sort of dialogue overlap. The league also gave a chance to flesh out Venarius, previously a character distantly mentioned but not actually of much direct importance, into being the central antagonist and the hero as part of an extended twist. But that, in turn, meant that the story needed a different narrator… it’s all an interesting series of decisions based on competing needs, and you can read the whole thing now.