Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall is an RPG about cooking and vampires
Hop to it.
Manage a family restaurant by day and battle vampires by night in Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, a tabletop roleplaying game inspired by Chinese folklore and culture.
Set in one of the many Chinatowns of 1920s America, Blood in the Banquet Hall is an upcoming RPG about a Chinese family from the Guangdong province of Southern China who open their own restaurant in the US. Despite resistance from US society, anti-Chinese laws and racism from restaurant-goers, the family manages to start turning a profit. However, family members begin suffering from terrible dreams and the local community are whispering about the arrival of a dreaded Jiangshi - a hopping vampire of legend, which feeds on the living and turns them into the undead.
A horror roleplaying game with gameplay elements derived from board games, Blood in the Banquet Hall sees players become a family who must successfully run their restaurant service during the day and survive the events of each night.
Each morning, the GM will present the players with a series of restaurant cards that they must attempt to complete before the end of the day. With a limited number of hours available to them, the family’s oldest member must carefully delegate cards to ensure that they finish as many as they can. Any unfinished restaurant cards can result in any number of consequences for the family, alongside covering up important slots on the restaurant board.
The busy restaurant service isn’t the only drain on the players, as every night during each five-day session will end in a player receiving a Mung card. These cards represent the type of dream that each family member experienced that night, with the potential to have either good or bad effects. Bad Mung cards cover up character traits and prevent players from using them, with only a conversation about the dream freeing a character.
During the night phase of the RPG, players can encounter a Jiangshi who will attempt to attack family members in order to give them cards and eventually turn them into one of the undead. Players can evade or immobilise a Jiangshi by creating spirit papers, which are made from a collective thought about the family’s resilience and love for one another.
The designers behind Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall are Banana Chan - who has previously written for the 80s-inspired RPG Kids on Bikes - and Sen-Foong Lim, the co-creator of party board games Junk Art and Dungeons & Dragons: Rock, Paper, Wizard.
Blood in the Banquet Hall is being released by Wet Ink Games, a small publisher responsible for launching roleplaying games such as WWI RPG Never Going Home and Tenebria: Remnants of Rome, a historical RPG based on the +One rules system.
Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, which is on Kickstarter until August 14th. Its creators encourage players to enjoy the RPG whilst being respectful of Chinese culture and history and American-Asian people, with tips on how to play as a Chinese character featured on the Kickstarter page.
Players can get a copy of the RPG’s boxed set for $65 (£52), estimated to arrive sometime this December.