Five days ago, the elegant luxury liner Lusitania II departed from San Francisco for its two week cruise to Nome, Alaska and back. Several important ambassadors were on board, meeting with each other, probably politiking and conducting informal negotiations. Lots of strange things kept happened in the past five days, bomb threats, bodies with gunshot wounds mysertiously appearing and then being misplaced, burgluraries... it was exactly as if the whole place were a hornet's nest of espionage. Of course, you wouldn't know anything about that, being innocent bystanders on vacation. Besides, what happened then doesn't matter as much as your current situation...
About fifteen minutes ago, the ship's alarms began to go off, requiring that everyone abandon ship. The ship was on fire. The six of you got into this lifeboat together and cast off five minutes ago...
Which is where you are now.
Lifeboat is an Assassin game. It assumes that the players have a basic knowledge of how Assassin games generally work. Any player who has questions regarding the structure of the game, their character, or anything else should ask the GM (Game Master, the author of the game and the person running it, in this case, Marleigh Norton.)
The game runs for 3 hours, players are expected to be playing the entire time.
There are guns in this game. They are simulated by a disc gun. Discs cannot be resued. Players whose characters have guns should supply their own disc gun. It should be filled up with 20 discs. This gun cannot be reloaded unless you have a clip, in which case you can use it by putting 20 more discs in your gun.
A throwing knife is simulated by a foam pellet. To throw a knife at someone, take the pellet out of your pocket and throw it at them. The GM will tell you what happens. Foam pellets will be supplied by the GM.
RTI stands for Random Technical Implement. In game, it can look like anything, a bunch of transistors, a circuit board, whatever. Out of game, it looks like a lego. There are red, blue, and yellow RTIs. If the thing you're building does not specify what type of RTI you need, assume it can be any color. If the RTIs are not put together, they should be loose. If the RTIs are assembled into something, they should be stuck together. RTIs can be reused, ie. if you build something out of some and then disassemble the device, you can get the RTIs back. This is different from STIs. STIs are Specific Technical Implements. There are very few of these and they have cool names, like Positronic Flux Capacitor. Once they are used, they cannot be retrieved from a device. STIs are represented by cards which have the name of the STI on them.
If you want to try fighting, tell the GM. She'll tell you if you tip the boat over or not.
Back to Title Page. Send email to marleigh@mit.edu