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Short Description:
This is a game about a Chinese 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.
Night, however, brings a new terror.
Players take on the roles of members of the Chinese family (mostly from Guangdong province), spanning three generations, who face threats of jiangshi (hopping vampires) at night and racism by day. It has players balancing the responsibility of maintaining their family business with protecting themselves and their community from the dreaded Jiangshi. This is primarily a game about storytelling. Combat is limited, but horror, drama and sometimes comedy are the primary vehicles for driving the game forward.
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Long Description:
Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall is a tabletop roleplaying game which combines elements of RPGs with those of traditional board games. The game can be played as a "mini-series" or a one-shot.
Each game takes place over a number of days (usually five), alternating between day and night scenes where the roleplaying scenes take place. Day and night have different threats - in the daytime, the restaurant may experience racism or gang violence, while in the night time, Jiangshi are seeking warm bodies. During the day characters complete assigned restaurant tasks in order to keep the family business running.
Every morning, the Game Moderator deals out a tableau of Restaurant cards that the family will need to complete before diners start to arrive. Each Restaurant card needs from 1 hour to 3 hours to complete. Usually, the oldest member of the family takes charge and starts delegating the tasks to specific players. Each player uses their Resilience slots to complete tasks, indicated by the time and energy they have available to do it.
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, the first thing each character must do is 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.
Some of the Mung cards are in color which represent good dreams. Other Mung are in black and white, which represents bad dreams. When a player receives a bad Mung card, they place it in one of the card slots on their Character sheet, covering a trait (Item, Skill, Facet, etc.), in numerical order. While covered, a trait cannot be used. To rid themselves of a bad Mung, a character needs to talk about the bad Mung card with another player character during the afternoon or evening scenes. Once they’ve talked about it, they can discard the card.
After receiving their Mung cards, players take turns explaining their dreams to each other and the GM.
On subsequent mornings, any remaining Mung cards from previous rounds are kept as recurring nightmares that continue to plague the player character. They will roll the 1D4 as usual for more Mung cards, but instead of adding that number of cards to their character sheet, the result indicates the maximum number of Mung cards that the player character has to deal with this day.
The Character Sheet has several details about the player character that a player can fill out. During the game, Resilience slots may get covered up by Mung cards or Jiangshi cards. A character takes a Jiangshi card when they take stress or physical damage. When a Resilience slot gets covered by a Jiangshi card or a Mung card, that detail about the PC gets removed from play until they are healed. If a PC gets a Jiangshi card on a slot that already has a Mung card, they will remove the Mung card and replace it with the new Jiangshi card.
Once they have all 8 slots filled with Jiangshi cards, the player will then become a Jiangshi and they would flip over all the Jiangshi cards to reveal their new Skills. Though this fate can be terrifying, these can cards can be healed and removed through game play.
Players can create Spirit Papers by taking a slip of paper and writing a short phrase or sentence on it that captures how the family of characters stays strong and together. Spirit Papers can only be used once during the night time phases.
The GM must count to ten in secret while the family is thinking of their word or sentence. If the time expires and the family has not yet agreed upon what to write on the Spirit Paper, the Spirit Paper will not work.
If the Spirit Paper works (i.e. a meaningful phrase or sentence was written with the 10-second time limit), the Jiangshi has been immobilized and players can move onto healing their family member or evading the Jiangshi they’re faced with.
The whole group of non-GM players starts with a Family pool of six eight-sided dice (6D8) on the first day. As they progress through the days, player characters start feeling the stress the hauntings levy 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.
When a player is determining the outcome of a challenge they are engaged with, they roll all the dice in the Family pool at once and take the highest single value from one of the dice that they rolled as their outcome. Once per scene, a character can use one of their skills to reroll the dice pool to try to achieve a better result.
To determine the highest single value from a roll, complete the following steps:
Ming is rolling the Family pool to cook a feast for visiting dignitaries on Day 1. Ming’s first roll results in the following: 1 2 2 3 4 4 - their highest result is a 2 as the two 4s cancel out the 3 and one of the 2s, respectively! Wanting to impress their guests, Ming uses their Cooking Skill and rerolls the Family pool, ending up with the following result: 1 3 3 4 7 8. Their highest result is 7 because the 8 is cancelled out by the 4. Wiping their brow, Ming's character breathes a sigh of relief and serves a gorgeous noodle dish to the members of the San Francisco city council.
This game rewards player characters for failing, because it makes for a more interesting story! When a failure happens, the player who rolled receives an Individual die. The GM will also give player characters a die towards their Individual Pool when something occurs that makes their character happy or hopeful towards their Hopes and Dreams (labeled on their character sheet).
While the main use of Individual dice is to assist other players, a player character may add any number of their Individual dice to their own Challenge rolls. If they do this, ALL of the dice they use in this way are returned to the GM once the Challenge roll is resolved.
This game isn’t just for Asian-Americans - this game can be played by anyone! Just remember that the topics deal with some very real history and politics (Jiangshi aside).
Here are some tips on how to play:
