Season of the Wish in Destiny 2 has brought new activities and rewards, and it comes with another major piece of content: a new dungeon. These raid-like three-player activities are among the toughest and most intricate in the game, but they don’t require the six-player squads of Destiny 2’s raids. The new dungeon is called Warlord’s Ruin, and it’s set to release on December 1, the first Friday of the new season.

Details are sparse on Warlord’s Ruin, but we do know a few things, including when it’ll be available and some of what you can earn from it. We can also speculate about what Warlord’s Ruin means within the story of Destiny 2 as we push toward the last expansion of the current story, The Final Shape.

Note: The last section of this article contains images of dungeon rewards. If you want to go into the dungeon unspoiled, stop scrolling there.

When does Warlord’s Ruin release?

You can play Warlord’s Ruin at the daily reset on Friday, December 1, at 9 AM PT/12 PM ET. Keep an eye out for a game update around that time to make sure you’re ready to go.

How do you access Warlord’s Ruin?

Unlike other content in Destiny 2, Warlord’s Ruin isn’t free, but rather a paid piece of content. To gain access to it, you’ll need to either have purchased the Lightfall expansion and its annual pass (normally $100, but currently discounted on Steam for $40), or buy the Lightfall Dungeon Key. You can find the Dungeon Key on the Expansions tab of the Eververse Store, and it’ll run you 2,000 Silver, or around $20.

What’s the place of Warlord’s Ruin in the story?

We don’t know much about Warlord’s Ruin yet apart from the name, but we can intuit a few details about the dungeon based on Destiny 2 lore.

First and foremost, we know from the dungeon’s Collections tab that it’ll include Scorn enemies, based on the icon shown.

There’s also a short description that gives some hints: “Uncover buried histories and lingering grudges within a ruined Dark Age castle.”

In Destiny’s backstory, “warlord” was the name given to some of the precursors of the familiar Guardians players inhabit in the game. Before there was a Last City or a Vanguard to organize them, people resurrected with the power of the Light didn’t have much guidance. Some of them used their new immortality and spiffy magic to become territorial dictators, raising small armies. Those folks were called warlords.

Warlords were generally kind of horrible, as the name suggests. They rose during the Dark Age in Destiny’s history, which followed the apocalyptic Collapse that ruined the technological Golden Age that came about with the arrival of the Traveler. During that period, humans were scattered and often hunted by the Fallen and other alien forces still in the solar system. Warlords were kind of like medieval feudal lords, sometimes providing protection to the people who lived under them, sometimes subjugating them, and sometimes victimizing them and conquering or murdering whoever else came into their path. They weren’t all bad–Crucible vendor Lord Shaxx was also a warlord and worked to protect his people–but a lot of them were pretty awful.

As far as the lore is concerned, warlords most often come up in relation to the Iron Lords, the precursor group of Lightbearers who preceded the Guardians. The Iron Lords were former warlords who specifically worked to protect humanity and stood up to tyrants, and they went to war against various warlords on a number of occasions. So it stands to reason that Warlord’s Ruin could tell a story heavily related to the Iron Lords, including Lord Saladin, the last of their number who we have any interaction with. (Another Iron Lord, Lady Efrideet, is also technically still around, but we haven’t seen her since Destiny 1’s Rise of Iron expansion back in 2016.)

What we don’t know is how Warlord’s Ruin ties into the current story, but there are some avenues it might explore. The Lightfall expansion lore mentioned how residents of Neomuna ventured back to Earth in the period after the Collapse but chose not to make themselves known at the time, mostly because of the threat of the warlords. Visiting what appears to be the stronghold of a past warlord, we could be looking for more information about the Collapse and Neomuna’s weird Darkness object, the Veil.

We could also be looking for information related to Savathun’s actions after the Collapse, which concerned the Veil and plans she was laying to thwart the Witness. We’ve only gotten hints of what those plans and actions were, but with Savathun resurrected in the Season of the Witch, it’s possible this could be a place giving a look at what happened in the past.

There’s also some speculation that, if this dungeon has a lot to do with the Iron Lords, that it could concern SIVA, the nanomachine plague that eventually annihilated most of the Iron Lords. We learned about (and dealt with) SIVA back during the Rise of Iron campaign, but it hasn’t really been heard from since. Bungie hasn’t seemed like it wanted to revisit SIVA in any major capacity, but sectioning it off in a dungeon might be a way to go back to that thread without it becoming a major part of the rest of the game.

Warlord’s Ruin rewards

Warning: Spoilers for dungeon loot beyond this point!

Bungie hasn’t yet revealed everything you can get from Warlord’s Ruin, and the full data won’t be released into the game until the dungeon goes live. However, thanks to a slight bug with the transmogrification system in Destiny 2, we can get a glimpse of the dungeon’s armor before it’s available in the game.

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