Midnights, the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life, will be out October 21. Meet me at midnight.

📚 cissamione fic recs ❤ | requested! :)

TAKING OFF //

as you all may or may not know I play a lot of a little game called League Of Legends. the in game tutorial for it just straight up sucks ass. So here’s a very simple guide to how to play League.

Note: I’m avoiding addressing things the tutorial already showed, like how to move or use abilities. My goal is to explain important things that the game won’t teach you, so you’re not struggling and confused lol.

THE MAP

the most important thing to understand is the League map. here it is.

let’s explain how this works!

your team is either on the blue side or the red side. this doesn’t really matter much besides what buffs are closer to what lane (more on that later). your goal is to clear a path down one or all of the lanes to destroy all of the enemy team’s inhibitors, and eventually their Nexus.

each lane has two towers, and the home base has five (one per inhibitor, and two for the Nexus). towers do a fuckton of damage, so it’s best you don’t get hit by them. towers automatically target the nearest enemy to them, or the enemy that hit an allied champ while under the tower.

the jungle is a massive sector of the map, full of beneficial plants and neutral monsters. it’s a bit of a dangerous place compared to the safety of the lanes, but full of important objectives. more on those later.

THE LANES

there are 5 different positions: top, jungle, middle, bottom/adc, and support. I’ll continually color code these to give you more awareness on what you need to be doing at certain times.

59 tip: start by playing support. It’s a more forgiving role, you have an ally, and it helps to teach you the game without you having to worry about farming minions or getting kills. You’ll also learn how to ward and read a map.

TOP- top laners are usually strong and independent champions who can hold their own. During their laning phase, their goal is to farm minions and get strong so they can help later on in teamfights (or just plain on 1-on-1 fights).

Some beginner level top laners are:

• GAREN • DARIUS • NASUS •

JUNGLE- Junglers roam in all the jungle areas of the map, securing objectives and helping other lanes to get kills. Junglers are often sneaky and have powerful attacks or crowd control that help their allies secure a kill. They’re arguably one of the most crucial roles in the game.

Some beginner level Junglers are:

• WARWICK • VOLIBEAR • MASTER YI •

MID- Mid lane is where a lot of magic happens. It’s in between everything, bisecting the jungle, and is the most direct path to the enemy Nexus. A midlaner’s goal is to be multipurpose, farming to get their levels up, but also being available to help an ally out nearby. Champions here vary a lot.

Some beginner level midlaners are:

• LUX • AHRI • ANNIE •

ATTACK DAMAGE CARRY/BOT- The high damage members of the team. They begin fairly weak but as they gain items they become extremely dangerous. Their goal is to farm and help the Jungler secure the dragons (Drakes) while they build up power and try to get kills. You’ll be a powerhouse by the end of the game. Another candidate for most important role.

Some beginner level bot laners are:

• MISS FORTUNE • JINX • ASHE •

SUPPORT- their goal is to babysit the bot laner and make sure they don’t die, as well as try to feed their bot lane as many kills as possible. supports have crowd control or defense (or both) that make them very pesky in battle, stunning or silencing their opponents so they can’t attack. They gain gold passively based on their item, so avoid attacking minions! Those are for your bot laner! You should, however, be attacking the enemy laners whenever possible!

Some beginner level supports include:

• LUX • NAMI • SERAPHINE •

remember this: champs are often designed for a specific role and should not be played outside of those roles while you’re learning to play!! later on you can experiment a bit, but start out with very fundamental characters. The practice tool and blind pick are your best friends for trying out new champs!

ACTUAL GAMEPLAY

okay, you have your role, you have your goal. what now?

PREGAME AND CHAMPION SELECT- You’ll need to choose and lock your character. In blind pick, which is your only option until you’re level 10, you will have to claim a position in chat. Once you get to draft, you’ll be assigned a role. you will also need to prepare a rune page. while you begin, you can often just use the premade rune pages, but as you play on you’ll want to learn how to make your own, as they’re vital to success on your champ.

common premade rune page options for lanes:

TOP - yellow or red

JUNGLE - varies, often red

MID - red, yellow, or purple

BOT - yellow or red

SUPPORT- green or purple

red and yellow runes are often for doing damage or attacking with extra strength/speed. purple helps spellcasters/mages, usually helping to regulate mana usage and magic damage. green tree is for defense, and is multipurpose and can be used in many lanes depending on what you’re doing. blue tree isn’t often used as a primary tree, but is seen often in secondary as it helps you bend the rules a little bit with bonus mana or free items.

59 tip: If your computer can handle it I recommend downloading Porofessor. It connects to your league client automatically and gives you recommended runes and builds, tips on your opponents, and comparisons to pro players so you can work on your game.

You will also get to choose summoner spells, the two squares at the bottom of your screen. One of them should be flash (yellow), and the other one depends on your position.

Top often takes ghost (blue) or teleport (purple), mid and support often take ignite (red),and bot often takes heal (green).

Junglers always take smite. always always always. do not take smite if you aren’t a jungler.

every summoner spell (except smite) is only to be used in an emergency, as they’re high cooldown.

there are more options, but these are the most commonly used.

WHEN THE GAME BEGINS- purchase your starter item. there’s a screen that you can go to that recommends a build for you, and you can often purchase directly from there. Junglers must purchase one of the two knives, emberknife or hailblade.

If you’re a jungler, you’re likely going to go to one of the two buffs. There’s red buff (bottom left for blue side, top right for red side) and blue buff (top left for blue side, bottom right for red side). Red buff slowly heals you and helps you do a little extra damage, while blue buff replenishes your mana and hastens your ability cooldowns.

If you are in bot/support or top lane, you may need to leash. Leashing is when you follow your jungler to their buff (depending on what buff they go to) and auto attacking the buff to do a bit of damage so your jungler doesn’t lose as much health taking down the buff. If your side doesn’t need a leash, you can go to lane.

Midlaners can just go to their lane to prepare for the game if they’re not requested elsewhere.

Your 4th item slot has wards. These grant vision of the foggy parts of the map. Place as many as you can in bushes. They’re vital. You can also trade wards in for the sweeper trinket, which scans for enemy wards and reveals them. Destroy any enemy wards you see.

As the game progresses, you’ll need to get drakes (dragons), rift scuttlers, and the baron. There are two pits on the map, one at the top of the river of red side, one at the bottom of the river on blue side. The rift scuttler and baron spawn at the top pit (baron pit), while drakes spawn at the bottom pit (dragon pit).

The rift scuttler can be killed and re-spawned in a lane to do tons of damage to towers before it’s killed. The baron provides a powerful but temporary buff that makes your minions super strong, helping them destroy towers and inhibitors. The baron replaces the scuttler, and once the baron spawns there will be no more scuttlers.

There are 4 kinds of elemental drakes: infernal (damage), cloud (haste), ocean (healing), and mountain (defense). The first two dragons are random, then a specific soul is decided after that. The map will change to reflect the new soul, and send a global announcement. Once your team kills 4 drakes, they’ll unlock the current soul, which gives a powerful permanent buff. There’s also the Elder Dragon, who, when killed, provides a temporary lethality buff, making all of your attacks do substantially more damage. This guy only spawns after a team has claimed the soul, and will be the only drake to spawn after that point.

Make sure to keep an eye on your CS and KDA (defined below), which is in the top right corner of your screen. You want to have more CS than your opposing laner if possible. Your team is always displayed to you as blue, and enemies are always red. The top right shows your team’s total kills vs the other team’s, your KDA, your CS, and the time the game has gone on for. Also remember to keep an eye on your map!!! You want to know as much as possible about what’s going on, so check your map often.

GENERAL TIPS-

• first of all, league games go for a MINIMUM of 15 minutes each. Most games usually go an average of 20-40 minutes. Don’t join a game unless you can commit that time to your team!

• because league is a team game, quitting mid-game or going afk isn’t tolerated, and if you do it too much you’ll get temporarily banned.

• play with a friend! it’s more fun and will help you learn way faster. (psst dm me for my username and I’d love to teach you!)

• ping by pressing control and then left clicking and holding with your mouse. you’ll get a wheel of options that are fairly self explanatory.

• emote with “t”

• lock/unlock your camera with “y”

• press tab to see the full scoreboard, with items, CS, kills, and monster camp timers

• use built in dances with ctrl + 1-4 (1 is neutral, 2 is taunt, 3 is dance, and 4 is laugh)

• don’t touch jungle camps if you aren’t a jungler!!!!!!

• once you get to level 30, ranked is available. Absolutely do not play ranked until you are confident with your preferred champs (yes plural) and can handle being bullied in chat.

CULTURE TIPS AND DEFINITIONS:

• “flaming” is part of the experience and is inevitable. We all have bad games, so don’t let it get to you.

• “ff” means to ForFeit. doing /ff starts a team vote to surrender and end the game early. This can only be done after 15 minutes.

• “feeding” or “fed” means that a character has a lot of kills and is abnormally powerful. Feeding is the act of dying a lot and basically “spoon-feeding” the kills to the opponent. Feeding is bad, avoid.

• “inting” means “intentionally feeding”. Often when inting is used as a term tho, it’s just casual way to say “throwing the game”. People don’t often intentionally feed, but the term has become synonymous with playing like shit.

• you will become synonymous with your character eventually lol. People don’t refer to people by their usernames in-game, just their character, and there’s a lot of teasing about certain character “mains” being xyz. (Mains meaning you mainly play that character)

• AP = attack power

• AD = attack damage

• AF = adaptive force

• magpen = magic penetration

• KDA = kills/deaths/assists ratio

• CS = “creep score”, the number of minions you’ve killed

• ult/ulti/ulty = ultimate ability (r)

• drag = dragon

One of the saddest songs I’ve ever written just got sadder 🙃Drove up to Long Pond Studios to record All Too Well (Sad Girl Autumn Version) with the besties Aaron Dessner and Jonathan Low

Just a friendly reminder that I would never have thought it was possible to go back and remake my previous work, uncovering lost art and forgotten gems along the way, if you hadn’t emboldened me. Red is about to be mine again, but it has always been ours. Tonight we begin again. Red (my version) is out now.

https://taylor.lnk.to/redtaylorsversion

Rest In Peace, Helen McCrory (1968-2021)