One of the best parts of Gen Con is getting to meet and chat with some of the designers behind my favorite games, from the big releases to the indie titles that keep the TTRPG scene alive. This year I was lucky enough to meet up with Banana-chan, writer and designer who’s worked on titles like Van Richten’s Guide To Ravenloft, Tian Xia, Betrayal At House On The Hill, and one of my favorite horror TTRPG’s ever: Jiangshi: Blood In The Banquet Hall, which she created alongside Sen-Foong Lim and originally released back in 2022 to critical acclaim. Now the game is in the midst of crowdfunding its second printing, and I took the opportunity at Gen Con to learn a bit more about her goals for the game and what we can look forward to in this new version of the game.
Give me a picture of what Jiangshi: Blood In The Banquet Hall is all about.
Banana Chan: So, Jiangshi: Blood In The Banquet Hall is a tabletop role-playing game where you’re playing a Chinese-American family running a restaurant. The main setting is in the 1920s, but we have different settings you can use and I love the flexibility of the system for that. Then, at night, vampires come out and attack everyone.
The game is a lot about family, knowing your family or found families, and trying to come together as a family. So that’s what the basis of the game is about. And also food, which is one of those thing that lets come together, it lets us relate to one another and do things together.
I think the core of the game is just about being regular people, right? You’re just regular people getting thrown into weird situations. Most people know what it’s like to to have family members or understand family dynamics are like. So I think we tried to play on that. We tried to make sure that when players are getting into play, they have that touchstone of what a family member is like in this game and that’s how you’re gonna play them out.
We also have hopes and dreams on the character sheet. We have a lot of different things on the character sheets that sort of drive that, where the focus is on trying to be like as “real” of a character as possible. You have to remind yourself that, you know, you are playing a regular family. It just so happens that you are Chinese-American, you’re running a restaurant, and it’s the 1920s.
All of that information about how hard it was to live during that time as a Chinese American immigrant, really, an immigrant family in general, how hard it was for them to live during that. So that was mostly the focus, right? And then we talked to James Mendez Hodes, who is our cultural sensitivity consultant. We worked together on trying to create a set of rules for people to basically understand how they can play this in a safe way and also a fun way. Because we don’t want this to be a not fun experience, we don’t want this to be like reading a textbook. We want Jiangshi to be a game I can pick up and play and feel good about. I had intimate moments with other family members, but I also had really fun or funny moments with the other family members at the table. So that’s sort of what we were driving for and so I think those two things made it easier for folks to pick it up and be like “Okay, I can play this.”
Tell me how you decided to make a more tactile game experience, almost like a board game, in both this game and Revenant Society?
Banana Chan: So, Revenant Society, to give some quick context, is about a bunch of Revenants. They’ve been brought back to life, or quote unquote life. They’re not actually living beings, they’re undead. they have to figure out the mystery behind their own deaths, their own (maybe) murders, and how it’s related to a shattering event. An event that, if they don’t figure it out, then they’re stuck in a time loop forever.
For that there were two settings. 1910s Paris setting and then the 1920s New York setting, sort of the the next thing after Jiangshi. Sun and I have been joking about this, sating “Is this set in the same universe?” And we joked about it with Julie [Ahern] from Van Ryder Games, and she said “Yes, please.” So yes, it is now all set in the same universe.
But essentially for the components of both games, I feel like making it sort of like a hybrid board game/TTRPG was what we wanted to do initially. And I think that it’s because we really like the ephemera I’ve worked with at the board games I’ve designed. I was one of the designers on Chucky the board game and I’ve published board games in the past. It was was definitely something that we were thinking about a lot. So trying to figure out how can we make this more tactile? How can we create ephemera out of it? How can we create artifacts out of like the things that we’re playing with? We wanted to make it an easy way for you to understand everything that’s going on at the table with whatever pieces you’re given.
Tell me a bit about the second printing. What’s new?
Banana Chan: So there are two things that we’re adding to it. Aside from all the stretch goals and things that, you know, may or may not hit, the things that we are definitely going to go for is one of. We worked with Carlos Cisco, who was a screenwriter for Star Trek: Discovery, and Jasmine Bhullar aka ThatBronzeGirl.
Love her! Interviewed her recently.
She’s so smart and amazing, love her. Daniel Kwan is writing a scenario, and it was really cool to get to work with him again. We worked together in the past on Tian Xia, in a different capacity. James Mendez Hodes also came back to write a scenario this time, he wrote about orcs. We’re really getting a chance to expand the world a little bit.
We also have a new pack of Mung cards. So these are the cards that depict dreams, they’re might be nightmares, they could be dreams, but these cards basically cover up your character sheet and render certain abilities useless. That’s how you take damage: as you’re taking damage, things on the character sheet get covered up and so you can’t use them anymore. It’s the same with health in general, right? As you’re becoming more and more like a jiāngshī, those slots get covered up. So there are jiāngshī cards and then there are Mung cards and those are two cards that alter your character sheet.
What’s it been like seeing this game really take off like this?
Banana Chan: It’s been interesting seeing the reception. When we were making the game, the original audience for it was tabletop role-playing people. People who want to play TTRPGs or who already play TTRPGs and they love storytelling. That was the audience that we were going in with. But then we found out that there were other places that were also interested in it. We sold the game to the Wing Luke Museum, which is a museum for Asian-American studies and culture. They bought up a few copies and we thought “Wow, this is really cool.” We’ve seen a lot of people who have an Asian American studies background or scholars or people who study the history. They’ve been talking about it. They’ve been really interested. And also just like seeing actors from Hollywood be like, oh, this is a cool game, can we play this? Can I play this with my friends? So yeah, that’s been really exciting too.
You can back Jiangshi: Blood In The Banquet Hall on Backerkit now.
Images via Wet Ink Games
Have strong thoughts about this piece you need to share? Or maybe there’s something else on your mind you’re wanting to talk about with fellow Fandomentals? Head on over to our Community server to join in the conversation!