Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall (2021)

Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall is a collaborative, storytelling RPG about a Chinese-American family making their living by running a restaurant in one of America’s Chinatowns, circa 1920. Despite societal backlash and anti-Chinese laws, they have turned a profit and their quality of life has recently improved.

Players take on the roles of members in the family, spanning three generations, who face threats of Jiangshi (hopping vampires) at night and oppression by day.

Players must balance the responsibility of running and maintaining their family business with protecting themselves and their community from the supernatural forces.

A game session takes place over a number of days, alternating between day and night scenes where the roleplaying scenes take place. During the day characters complete assigned restaurant tasks in order to keep the family business running. And the Game Moderator will out a tableau of Restaurant cards that the family will need to complete before diners start to arrive. Their success is determined by using Resilience slots from their characters to complete the tasks.

Once the tasks have been completed to the best of the family’s abilities, the GM takes any Restaurant cards that were left undone and places them on the central Restaurant board, rotating them such that the consequences face the players and cover the restaurant’s slots.

Prior to starting the morning scenes, each character must see how they’re feeling from the trials and tribulations of the previous day. Each player rolls 1D4 and receives that many Mung cards from the GM which represent the dreams and nightmares of the characters.

Colored Mung cards are good dreams, black-and-white Mung cards are nightmares, and must be used to cover a trait on their Character sheet. Covered traits are unusable until the bad dream is removed via role-play. If a character is unable to remove the bad dream Mung cards that cover up all of the traits on their character sheet, then the character is turned into a Jiangshi, a vampire. The black-and-white Mung cards are flipped over to reveal new skills.

To remove the Jiangshi from the restaurant the players have 10 seconds to write a short phrase or sentence on it that captures how the family of characters stays strong and together. If the group is able to complete the phrase in the 10 second period (GM keeps count) then the Jiangshi is immobilized and can be then healed through gameplay.

The whole group of players (not including the Game Moderator) starts with a Family pool of six eight-sided dice (6D8) on the 1st day. As they progress through the days, player characters start feeling the stress the hauntings on the family, reducing their pool of dice available. These dice are used to overcome challenges, or to help council and care for the emotional health of the family, removing Mung cards from their character sheets.