Shout out to some of the world’s larp conventions. This list would be way longer if I included all the general gaming conventions that offer larp as part of the fun; I tried to keep it to just the larp cons here.
Conventions for talking about larp, meeting larpers, and occasionally larping:
Mittelpunkt — The German Knudepunkt held in January near Frankfurt.
Solmukhota 2012 — This year’s Knutepunkt. April 12-15, Finland.
Odraz — The Czech Knutepunkt, in 2011 it was in April.
WyrdCon — the American Knutepunkt. June 21-24, California.
Larp Symposium 2011 — The Italian Knutepunkt (use Google translate to read it) held in October.
GNiales — The French Knutepunkt held in November in Paris.
Conventions for larping in larps:
Chimera — August convention in Auckland, New Zealand
InterCons — conventions sponsored by LARPA that focus on theater-style games. In DC in September and Massachusetts in March.
DREAMATION and DEXCON — General gaming cons with a larp presence in New Jersey. DREAMATION runs in February, DEXCON runs in July.
I want to larp the world!
Thanks for the list, Lizzie. I have some traveling to do.
For the record, Intercon for at least the last few years has had a “Thursday thing” that lasted Thursday night and Friday day that was a larp theory conference. They had two rooms of panels on all types of larp topics. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were larps. It’s also a great place to meet larpers, though it is a specialized, highly dedicated group. They hovered just under 300 people for a while, but I think they’ve increased their registration a lot recently.
Intercon has also been around for over 20 years. Two Wyrd was Intercon-West (but has since dropped the moniker). Although I haven’t been to Fastaval (http://www.fastaval.dk/) or a Knutepunkt yet, from what I read, Intercon is also a strong contender to be the American Knutepunkt.
There’s also Intercon Mid-Atlantic, which will be in October this year in Baltimore: http://www.ima2012.com/
Don’t forget Prolog, Sweden’s biggest larp convention! It’s been around for four years and gathers pretty much all kinds of larpers for games, workshops and panel discussions. Most of the program is in Swedish though, so maybe not super attractive for international visitors…
Hi,
Thanks for giving New Zealand some Link Love. We’ve also started another larp convention called Hydra, which is based near Wellington in April. (http://hydra.nzlarps.org/)
Cheers,
Stephanie
Of note is that Gencon also has LARPs (theatre, boffer, World of Darkness, etc) available. And as of this year (and I believe going forward), Games on Demand offers American Freeform LARPs.