Pirate Academy is a larp focused on role-playing and living within the experience. You can imagine being a character in a pirate movie, with all ensuing feelings, goals, action and adventure. But unlike a movie, a larp is a 360° experience where "What You See Is What You Get". Our goal is to create an event that is as immersive as possible. There will be a few soft rules to simulate fencing, fighting, shooting a gun or a cannon, poison and drugs, but the rest will seem, and be, as real as possible.

Pirate Academy can be described as an easygoing and collective coming-of-age story about soon-to-be heroes learning how to act like pirates and becoming a real crew, to get to the risky mission that will make them rich and famous! The mood is light-hearted: comical and funny, but not farcical or ludicrous.

There will also be drama, secrets and conflicts between characters, but conflicts aren’t there to pursue some sort of personal “victory” but to explore and develop relationships between each other, to one goal: the collective building of an exciting story.

Keywords: sailing, adventure, secrets, mystery
Inspirations: Treasure Island, The Curse of Monkey Island, The Princess Bride, Galavant, Black Sails, On Stranger Tides, Dodgeball.

Pirate Academy features 27 characters, all written by the authors and introduced by a brief and public textual outline, which will be available for everyone to read in advance on our Portal. In line with the “movie-like” style of Terre Spezzate, we will call this brief introduction a “teaser”.

The teaser will only reveal enough of a character to get a general idea of it, providing enough interesting details to make an informed choice about what character you want to play, while staying spoiler-free.
Character teasers are online here: Italian run or English run.

The public information represents just a fraction of a character's life and there is much more to discover, such as compromising secrets, feuds and friendships, hidden agendas and goals. After choosing characters, players will be granted access to the full description. No other player will be able to read this information: it will be your secret until the larp.


Let’s take a look at a couple of character teasers (see the next paragraph to view *all* characters' teasers):


“So you think I will never become a real pirate? Watch me, you filthy bilge rat!!”
THEMES: blind enthusiasm - adventure - revenge - dream

Some might define J. Lafitte as an enthusiastic, courageous and persevering person who has pursued the dream of a lifetime since childhood. But those would be very few, in fact... most people on Melee Island would rather say: "a pain in the ass", childish, stubborn and cheating. Everyone agrees that Lafitte is like that because of the legendary corsair Lafitte, who was killed in mysterious circumstances leaving behind two orphaned children; the desire for revenge and to follow in their father's footsteps shaped J's personality. The whole enterprise of posing as Captain Phoenix and his crew is actually Lafitte's idea.


“Moral wounds may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.”
THEMES: freedom - revenge - treasure hunt

Once upon a time, on Lucre Island, there was a wealthy and honest merchant, without an ounce of desire for adventure. Martinez's life was perfect and planned: good family business and a wedding looming, until the scion of the Sotomayor family was falsely accused and thrown in jail to rot forever. Strange friendships are made in prison, and thanks to a lucky acquaintance, Martinez ended up escaping from jail and obtaining secret information to find the richest and most legendary treasure in the Caribbean.
How J.A. ended up disrupting the lives of unsuspecting strangers on Melee Island and boarding La Grace... well, that's another story.


“God, your vengeance may sometimes be slow in coming, but I think that then it is all the more complete.”
THEMES: revenge - investigation - lies - finding a new purpose

When newcomers arrive to Melee Island, usually nobody cares... except for innkeepers and brothel workers looking for new customers.
When Cowman set foot in town it was no different. While the Stranger surely managed to get some information on the islanders, nobody could guess a damn thing about who that mysterious English traveller actually was. "Nobody, for now...." was the baffling answer that Cowman gave to everyone who asked. One thing is sure, judging by the cautious behaviour and the elusive nature of the newcomer, it is clear that Cowman is hiding something, and either looking for or running from something, maybe someone. That might be the reason this outsider joined the crew; in fact even the circumstances of the Stranger's recruiting are confusing...
Actually, it's hard to tell who exactly asked Cowman to join them.

Here you may read the "public description" of every character. Who will you be?
Characters for the Italian run
Characters for the English-language run
The characters for both runs are identical.
While all the characters live in the same fictional island where our story begins, they will be originally from several different European Countries, and nationality will influence some relations. The language gap is not relevant, since in the English-language run everyone will speak English, and in the Italian-language run everyone will speak Italian, regardless of the character's (or player's) nationality.

We want to offer every participant the chance of playing a character they will love, therefore the characters will be written as neutral; their names will be like J. Lafitte, W. Barker or R. Pulling and every player will choose for the character a given name of their own liking. There will be love, friendship, romance and family bonds. While relationships are binding and players are expected to play them, their actual nuances are open to a more detailed characterization by the players involved. Meaning that a strong bond could be portrayed as friendship or romance, or even as one-sided love.

Pirate Academy is a larp about adventure. Although it is set in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy it is not an historical larp in any sense. To make it even more obvious, our story begins in a fictional place: Mêlée Island, home to the characters and setting of their background story.

Mêlée Island is currently ruled by a British Governor, Horatio Tiberius Marley, but it was previously controlled by the Spaniards and theater to continued disputes between the two kingdoms over the previous years. Despite the presence of the present and former Governor, the small port has always been a safe haven for scoundrels, bootleggers, buccaneers and pirates. The town is inhabited by all sorts of people, honest good-working ones along with more shady individuals who arrived there to hide from their troubles. Rich and poor, nobles and peasants, naive dreamers and callous criminals, all the inhabitants of Melee Island share a common background, but a bunch of them (the characters of our story) are about to leave for the adventure of a lifetime.

The protagonists of Pirate Academy live on the island and the majority of them all know each other, for good or for bad. After finding a Letter of marque on a pirate’s dead body, granting a ship and a mission worth a fortune to a Captain Phoenix, now dead, a small group of dreamers decided to take the odds and find enough fellow citizens willing to enroll for a risky adventure in order to claim the mission and crew the ship. One of them impersonates Captain Phoenix, while the others pretend to be the experienced corsairs following the Captain. That's how a bunch of debatable, to say the least, group of people, managed to trick Governor Marley and obtain the majestic ship called La Grace to embark on the privateer mission that will make them rich and famous.

Some for glory, some for freedom, some for gold, some for adventure, they all accepted the impossible mission to become real pirates in just four days and change their life forever.