Live Action Role Playing – The College of Wizardry

Live Action Role Playing (LARP) games are a form of role play that happen in a realistic-looking fictional worlds where participants are actively improvising and performing their character actions. LARP’s usually don’t have an audience, all participants co-create and influence the entire experience. The number of participants in LARPs differ, from several players to thousands (e.g. ConQuest , a 10.000 + player LARP in Germany).

The College of Wizardry is a LARP event where more than 140 participants can play different roles such as students or professors at a magical school of wizardry. The location is the beautiful Czocha castle in Poland, where participants role-play, eat and sleep for four days.

The College of Wizardry and other similar LARPS (e.g. Fairweather Manor, a Downton Abbey inspired LARP) are good examples of how to use a mix of design thinking approaches to create an immersive memorable experience.

A very interesting fact about the College of Wizardry is that it managed to create out of Czocha Castle a destination in itself. The castle now is the worldwide place go to place for want to be wizards. Just google the term “Czocha Castle” and look at the results.

Recently a few participants from the College of Wizardry launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a similar LARP in the United States called: New World Magischola: A College of Wizardry Larp. The crowd-funding campaign reached and surpassed its goal in just a few minutes after being published on Kickstarter.

More information about the College of Wizardry and LARPs can be found on this link.

LARPs are also successfully used in education. For example the Osterskov Efterskole in Denmark is the only school in the world that teaches through Live Action Role-Play.