About Us

ILDB - International Larp Database is a project dedicated to researching, organizing, and archiving all information about live action role-play, from its origins to the present day. It brings together organizations, events, authors, participants, locations, suppliers, articles, images, and videos to map and enhance larp culture.

What is Larp

In larp, participants physically step into the shoes of characters in a story they perform without a fixed script, improvising based on what they know about their fictional identity and the imagined world in which their characters move. As if they were protagonists in a novel or a film, characters relate to each other and to the environment, which figuratively or realistically recreates the setting where the narrative events take place.

Larp stands midway between gaming and theatre and, in its current form, certainly draws inspiration from tabletop role-playing games born in the 1970s as Dungeons & Dragons. In larp, this activity - fundamentally dialogic in tabletop RPGs - comes alive in a live action setting where participants no longer rely only on imagination, but also involve the body and the sensory apparatus. All character actions must be actually performed by the player-performer or, alternatively, simulated according to a predefined code. Participants do not perform for an external audience, but for themselves. Or rather, there is an audience, but it is made up exclusively of the other participants and the larp organizers.

There are different larp formats, distinguished by budget, duration, complexity, and many other parameters. There are chamber larps that last only a couple of hours and require minimal staging effort, as well as lavish and complex blockbuster larps lasting several days, or long serial larps made up of many episodes spread across multiple years.

Producing a larp can involve a variable number of people collaborating on organization, which - depending on complexity - can range from a single organizer to a team comparable to that of an independent film production.

The main author of a larp is called a larp designer and is often the head writer of a writers’ room of collaborators. In some cases, the larp designer also handles direction and production; in more complex larps, the roles of director and producer are separate. Likewise, set design, props, lighting and sound effects, special effects, costumes, special make-up, etc. may be managed by dedicated collaborators.

from Larp, giochi di ruolo dal vivo by Umberto Francia, Dino Audino Editore, 2023

The Larp Community

Worldwide, larpers are hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - but it is hard to say because there is no complete mapping of this data. The larp world is still largely a secret garden, and without proper documentation there is a risk that part of this experience will be lost, that its protagonists will be forgotten, that know-how will be dispersed, and that enormous potential will remain unexpressed.

ILDB’s Mission

International Larp Database researches, organizes, catalogs, and archives in an online database all live action role-play events held in Italy, Europe, and worldwide, from the birth of the phenomenon to today. An enormous amount of data that tells, for each event, the stories, authors, directors, technicians, performers, locations, costumes, scenography, and much more.

ILDB aims to map a phenomenon and a cultural movement, while also strengthening a community and connecting people from different geographic, cultural, and social backgrounds.

Credits

ILDB - International Larp DataBase is a project by the cultural association Progetto Goldstein, funded by Next Generation EU and the Italian Ministry of Culture within the PNRR TOCC framework (digital transition for cultural and creative organizations), developed in collaboration with Eryados, with the patronage of Writers Guild Italia - the union of Italian screenwriters - and Federludo, the Italian federation of gaming associations.