Larp library

Larp out-of-character has an interesting video up of a NELCO talk about Larp Library, NEIL’s online larp repository:

This is from 2015, when Larp Library was new. Now it has 71 larps on it, including pretty much everything by Mike Young and many of the old ILF Gamebank games they discuss.

Along the way there’s an interesting discussion of licencing. Larp Library has a very limited list of licenses it supports - basicly Creative Commons Attribution and Sharealike (but not No Derivatives or Non Commercial) and Public Domain. Its gone this way because running a larp usually requires certain rights - the right to distribute character sheets, the right to modify the work e.g. to genderswap or cut characters. But protecting these rights has some potentially unpleasant consequences around other people being allowed to sell your larp, or hack it to bits in a way which totally destroys its integrity. That seems like a really tricky thing to balance, and it seems like the risk of modifications is one reason why people don’t publish. There’s also some discussion of fanfic larps like Blackfyre Rising, the short version of which is that George R R Martin could come after people with a horde of ice-zombie lawyers if he gave enough of a damn. So the site (and other equivalents) probably can’t be used for those.

Larp Library has now moved to its own domain:

https://www.larplibrary.org/