Day Thirty: Jiangshi: Blood In The Banquet Hall

 Sometimes the past haunts you, and sometimes the past literally haunts you!

Jiangshi is a TTRPG about Chinese immigrants in the 1920s who are run a family restaurant by day and fight hopping vampires by night! The book goes into lots of detail about Chinese immigrants, Chinatowns in different American cities, and Chinese restaurants. It inspired me to do some research about Chinese immigrants here in New Zealand too, which I never got around to using. Things are getting better, but there's still a lot of culture shock and racism to be faced. As well as vampires! The game is divided into a day and night phase. During the day, the players have to complete tasks to keep the restaurant running, and at night they have to fight the vampires. As stress accumulates, characters lose access to their abilities until it's managed.

Character Creation: One of my favourite parts of character creation comes right at the beginning. Characters must decide what generation of immigrant they are, what their role in the family is, and their language skills. Characters have 14 points to spend on language, putting 0-3 points in Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing - once for Chinese, and then again for English. This right here does so much to convey the immigrant experience. You can be very capable at Chinese, but extremely poor at English. You could have excellent English skills, at the expense of your native language. Or you could be sub-par at both. It's pretty tough! I made my character Hung Ah-Ming, he's a bit of a wheeler-dealer. Since he's first generation I've given him good oral Cantonese and average literacy; on the other hand, he has average English listening skills, but he's poor at speaking and reading, and can't write in English at all.

Beyond that, characters have seven other abilities, all of which can be overwritten to complete tasks or as you have bad dreams. Ah-Ming has his wok which he's brought over with him from Guangdong, and he's skilled at Cooking and Negotiate. He's an Entrepeneur, and a bit of a poet - I imagine this as more of a good turn of phrase than literally writing poetry. His heirloom is a jade bracelet from his grandfather, and his hopes and dreams are that he can start a family and start a successful restaurant that he'll be able to pass down to his children.

I hope the jiangshi don't get him!

Final Thoughts: This is a very niche game, but it's a fascinating niche; it puts you in someone else's shoes, and it prompted me to learn more about my own country's history. For that alone it's a wonderful game. I actually have a friend who'd really like to play this, so fingers crossed, maybe one day I'll get it to the table!