From event management to cultural memory: Larp Manager meets ILDB

Anyone who has organised a larp knows that a surprising amount of time is spent not on storytelling, but on spreadsheets, registration forms, payments, character lists and shared documents. In recent years, an increasing number of organisations have turned to Larp Manager, a platform designed to reduce that administrative burden and allow organisers to focus on creating better play experiences. 

In 2026, the project takes a further step forward through a new integration with International Larp Database (ILDB), the first global archive dedicated to documenting, preserving and promoting larp culture. Thanks to this integration, events can now update their information in ILDB automatically. 

 

Larp Manager was created by Mauro Scanagatta, an Italian software developer with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and many years of experience as a larp organiser. 

The idea emerged in 2020 during the founding of the Italian larp association Proxima. While searching for a management platform, Scanagatta realised that the available options were largely designed for US boffer campaigns rather than the formats common across Europe, such as new wave larps and one-shot events, so he decided to build the tool he wished existed. What began as a personal project, quickly attracted interest from other organisers. Over time, Larp Manager grew into a platform used by numerous associations, helping manage more than 170 events and over 9,000 player characters. 

Flexibility remains one of its core principles. As Scanagatta puts it:

Because every organising team develops its own processes, Larp Manager was designed to support different workflows rather than impose a single approach. 

 

The idea for the ILDB integration came from Mauro Scanagatta. The goal was straightforward: to eliminate duplicate data entry and make it easier to document events within the international archive. 

Working with ILDB’s Technical Lead, Scanagatta developed a system that allows the platforms to communicate automatically. Event organisers only need to connect Larp Manager to ILDB once during setup.  The Larp Manager interface is available in 11 languages, while documentation, guides and tutorials are currently available in English only. Detailed instructions are available on the Larp Manager website. 

After that, information is synchronised without further manual intervention. When event information is updated, ILDB automatically receives the relevant public data, including publicly available participant records and the characters they portrayed. The integration works for both campaigns and one-shot events, can be activated at any stage of the organisational process and then runs in the background. 

 

For organisers, the benefit is simple: entering the same information twice becomes unnecessary. For ILDB, however, the significance is broader. The archive's mission is to preserve the history of larp and make it accessible to the international community. Automating part of this process increases the likelihood that events will be documented accurately and consistently. The less time organisers spend copying data between systems, the easier it becomes to build a shared archive that can be explored by researchers, organisers and players alike. Perhaps most importantly, information that often remains scattered across private documents and internal records can now flow directly into an archive designed to preserve larp's collective history. 

That same community-minded approach is reflected in Scanagatta's decision to make Larp Manager open source.  He describes it as:

The software is free to use, and the ILDB integration comes at no additional cost. Organisations can either use the infrastructure provided by the project or host the platform themselves using the available documentation. 

Scanagatta also takes a cautious approach to generative AI, at a time when artificial intelligence is being promoted as a solution to almost every problem. In his view, management software depends on data that is accurate, reliable and stable over time — qualities that large language models cannot yet guarantee consistently enough. 

It is an approach that reflects the wider philosophy behind both projects: using technology not to replace people, but to remove administrative obstacles and strengthen the preservation of larp culture. 

Because every larp eventually comes to an end. Its history does not have to. 

 

Contributing to larp history  

Teams using Larp Manager can enable automatic synchronisation with ILDB and contribute directly to the documentation of their events within the international archive.
Configuration guide: https://larpmanager.com/tutorials/publication/#configuration