An emergency scenario is the foundation of every muster drill in The Muster App. Each scenario represents one type of emergency your vessel trains for — Fire on Board, Man Overboard, Flooding, Security Incident, Abandon Ship, and so on — and each one has its own muster stations, its own assigned crew, and its own list of duties.
This article walks you through creating scenarios from scratch in the admin panel, assigning crew to stations, defining duties, and setting up the special handling that abandon ship requires. Once your scenarios are configured, they show up automatically on every iPad on the vessel and become the structure your drills run against.
Where it lives
Scenario configuration happens in the admin panel under Muster Configuration. Log in at admin.themusterapp.com, click Muster in the left sidebar, then Configuration. The iPad doesn't let you create or edit scenarios — that's deliberately admin-only so a crew member can't accidentally delete your fire muster procedures at 0200.
What every yacht needs
Most professional yachts have somewhere between five and ten configured scenarios. The standard set covers:
- Fire on Board — usually broken down by location (engine room, galley, cabin, deck) but a single Fire scenario is fine if your duties are similar across locations
- Flooding — bilge alarm response, watertight door drills, pumping operations
- Man Overboard — lookout assignment, recovery boat launch, search pattern
- Collision / Grounding — damage assessment, watertight integrity, hull inspection
- Security Incident — ISPS Level 2/3 response, restricted area lockdown, crew accounting
- Pollution / Oil Spill — containment, SOPEP equipment deployment, reporting
- Medical Emergency — first aid response, MedAire/CIRM contact, helicopter evacuation
- Abandon Ship — the most important one. Liferaft assignments, station leaders, final mustering
You can add more if your vessel trains for them — heavy weather, helicopter operations, piracy response, charter guest evacuation. The system has no limit on the number of scenarios.
Creating a scenario
From Muster Configuration, click Add scenario. A panel slides in asking for:
- Scenario name — what your crew will see on the iPad. Keep it short and recognisable. "Fire — Engine Room" is better than "Engine Room Fire Response Procedure".
- Scenario type — one of the standard categories (Fire, Flooding, MOB, Security, Pollution, Medical, Abandon Ship, Other). This affects the icon and any special handling, particularly for Abandon Ship.
- Description — optional. A short note about when this scenario applies. Useful if you have multiple Fire scenarios and want to distinguish them.
Click Create and the new scenario appears in the configuration list, ready for you to add stations and crew.
Adding muster stations
A muster station is a physical location on the vessel where crew gather and operate during the scenario. Inside the scenario you just created, click Add station and fill in:
- Station name — "Bridge", "Engine Control Room", "Forward Deck", "Galley", whatever your crew know it as
- Station leader — the senior crew member responsible for the station during this scenario. They're the ones who report to the captain when their station is fully accounted for.
- Station procedures — optional free-text describing what happens at this station as a whole. Think of it as the captain's standing instructions for that station — "Confirm bilge pump status, secure loose equipment, report to bridge by VHF."
You can add as many stations to a scenario as you need. Most yachts have three to seven stations per scenario, depending on the size of the vessel and the complexity of the response.
Assigning crew and duties
Inside each station, click Add crew and pick a crew member from the dropdown (it shows everyone on your roster). The same crew member can be assigned to different stations across different scenarios — that's normal, because your engineer might be in the engine room for a fire but on the deck for an abandon ship.
For each crew member at each station, you can add one or more duties. A duty is a specific task that crew member is responsible for:
- "Operate fire pump"
- "Confirm engine room ventilation closed"
- "Report status to bridge"
- "Account for guests in cabins 1-4"
- "Launch port-side liferaft"
Multiple duties for one crew member are shown as bullet points under their name on the iPad. You don't need to worry about formatting — the iPad lays it out automatically.
Special handling: Abandon Ship
Abandon Ship is the only scenario type that gets a different layout, both in the admin panel and on the iPad. Instead of grouping by station, abandon ship groups by liferaft, with explicit port and starboard side designation and customisable leader role labels.
When you create an Abandon Ship scenario, the configuration page asks you to define liferafts instead of stations:
- Liferaft identifier — "Port Forward", "Starboard Aft", "Port Aft", etc.
- Side — Port or Starboard. Determines whether the iPad shows red or green colour coding.
- Capacity and type — e.g. "25-person SOLAS A". Optional but useful for inspectors.
- Liferaft leader — the crew member responsible for launching, boarding and managing the raft. The leader's role label is configurable per yacht — some use "Liferaft Commander", others use "Raft Leader" or the official IMO term. You set this once in the admin panel and it appears wherever the leader is shown.
- Crew assigned to this liferaft — same flow as muster stations: pick crew, add duties
The iPad's Abandon Ship view will then show the liferafts laid out as a port/starboard grid with red and green colour coding, exactly as configured.
Editing and reordering
Every part of a scenario can be edited after creation. Click any scenario, station, crew assignment or duty to open it for editing. You can also drag scenarios up and down to reorder them — the order in the admin panel is the order they appear on the iPad's scenario picker, so put the most-used scenarios at the top.
Editing a scenario propagates to every iPad on the vessel within a few seconds via the live sync. There's no "publish" step.
Crew on leave
If a crew member is currently marked as on leave, they're hidden from the iPad's muster list automatically — but their station assignments are still saved in the admin panel. When they return from leave and are toggled back to active, they reappear in their assigned station with their assigned duties. You don't have to re-configure anything.
This matches what the printed hard copy muster list does — crew on leave are excluded from the printed PDF too, so the iPad and the paper stay consistent.
Common pitfalls
A few things we see go wrong with new yachts setting up their first scenarios:
- Forgetting the station leader — every station needs one. Without a leader, no one knows who reports to the captain. The admin panel will warn you but won't block you, because some yachts deliberately leave the leader assignment until later.
- Duties that are too vague — "Help with fire" is not a duty. "Operate dry powder extinguisher in engine room, report status to bridge by handheld VHF" is.
- The same crew member at every station — if you assign the captain to every station in every scenario, the muster list becomes meaningless. Spread responsibility appropriately.
- Forgetting to update after crew rotations — when crew leave the vessel and new crew join, the scenario assignments need to be updated. The admin panel has a warning if any station has crew who are no longer on the roster.
- Not testing on the iPad — after you build a scenario, open it on the iPad and walk through it. If something looks wrong on the iPad, fix it in the admin panel and refresh the iPad.
Once you're done
After your scenarios are built, the next step is generating the printed hard copy muster list (which SOLAS requires you to post on the vessel) and then running your first drill against the live config. Both of those have their own articles below.