MIT Assassins' Guild

The MIT Assassins' Guild is a student society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that runs several live action role-playing games (LARPs) each semester. The Guild popularized the assassin game; it also runs Patrol, a game involving teams of players shooting at each other with dart guns, every Saturday night.

Guild games can be as short as a few hours or as long as ten days. Each game is run by a different game master team, made up of Guild members or alumni of the Guild. The games have been based on many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, espionage, and horror plots.

The Assassins' Guild was founded in 1982 or 1983 in order to play assassin-style games. These games were simple: each player was given the name of another player to "kill" with a toy gun or in another manner. When a player was killed, he was out of the game and his target became his killer's target. The targets were constructed in a complete loop; therefore, when a person got her own name as a target, she knew she was the last person playing and therefore the winner.

However, over time the Guild has moved towards much more complex games, called in the LARP community "theater-style" games, similar to those of the Society for Interactive Literature (SIL). As a parody of the name of SIL, the Guild also runs Society for Interactive Killing (SIK) games, which tend to be simpler, high-violence, high-death-count games.

External links

*MIT Assassins' Guild website
*Assassins' Guild Standard Rules
*Tensions in Live-Action Roleplaying Game Design, thesis by Philip Tan