The Jiangshi, Chinese hopping vampires, in an RPG that addresses the racism and oppression of 1920s Chinatown - featuring Banana Chan of Game and a Curry.

Read the full transcript and see art from the game here: https://scintilla.studio/monster-01-jiangshi-banana-chan/

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwZnw01Oz9U&list=PLNqL_h0x0qyZoNSS1VP1tBA5QCaie5Coo&index=2

Join the conversation:

https://twitter.com/sparkotter

https://www.instagram.com/sparkotter/

Guest links:

https://www.facebook.com/gameandacurry/

https://twitter.com/gameandacurry

https://www.facebook.com/WetInkGames

https://twitter.com/wetinkgames

Music by Jason Shaw at Audionautix: https://audionautix.com

A version of this article also appears on Love Thy Nerd: https://lovethynerd.com/jiangshi-lets-players-empathize-with-victims-of-systemic-racism/

You're just finishing up service.

The restaurant is starting to get a little empty.

When you stare out the window, you notice a person with their arms outstretched,

hopping, and they're hopping towards you.

Maybe they've been drinking even though it's prohibition

era, maybe they're injured.

Maybe they just need your help.

But when you look out the window, You also see that their face, it

doesn't like they're quite there.

They look like they're just staring at you and their eyes are sort of glazed over.

Their skin.

Isn't exactly what you would call alive.

It's gray and it doesn't look right.

So, um, this person is hopping towards you and they don't say anything once they've

gotten close enough to another person.

But she starts coming out of that other person's body.

There's this blue wisp flying out of this other person into the hopping.

Hello and welcome to making a monster.

The weekly podcast where game designers show you their favorite

monster, how it works, why it works and what it means this week.

I'm thrilled for you to meet banana Chan.

One of the designers for a new release called Zhang sugar

blood in the banquet hall.

She partnered with wedding games to bring this unique and

timely project to Kickstarter.

And because I'm future Lucas, I can tell you young should blue pass its

goals to become fully funded on day one.

And it's easy to see why.

Her diverse team of authors and designers have crafted a unifying and enlightening

cultural experience, utterly unique to the medium of tabletop gaming.

You should learn.

The banquet hall is about a Chinese family running a restaurant in the

1920s and in the daytime they're faced with oppression and, uh, you know, the

stress of having to run a restaurant and keeping up with their customers.

Meanwhile, at night, John should come out and they attack

everyone just a big, quick.

Background on what juncture are.

Yeah.

They're hopping vampires and they don't feed on blood necessarily.

They feed on the cheesy of a person, the life force of a person, or like I'm

a quote, unquote, the soul of a person.

Sen.

And I, we go back and forth on like the, the background of the juncture as well.

Cause there are a few different stories about like where they

came from mythologically, like in Chinese culture, like.

Had they become things.

One of my favorite stories is that this priest, this priest was trying to carry

bodies from point a to point B, trying to drag them along because they had to

burry them in a burial site and do like, you know, proper virtual type stuff.

And they realized that this is a lot of work.

So what they did was they enchanted a bunch of bodies with some paper talismans.

And then they started hopping and they start, uh, you know, hopping towards

the burial site behind the priest.

And that was like easy way of getting out of doing this long.

Yeah.

Or unfortunately some of the paper talismans fell off their heads and

that's how we have the juncture.

They just like run a muck and started destroying towns

and doing all that fun stuff.

How do you feel this story is represented mechanically in a game?

So in the game itself, each player has a character sheet that has slots.

And when they take damage, they cover up their slots.

Lots also have items, facets, skills, their hopes, and dreams,

things about the character, right?

So when they get filled up, they start becoming more and more like juncture.

So it's gradually erasing the parts of the parts of the character that

the player has chosen to define that character as being in personality.

Right?

Exactly.

So you could think of it as like, you know, literally turning more and more

into Joshua or, you know, if you were thinking about it in terms of like

a, uh, an allegory it's like they're becoming more and more assimilated, or

there may be an acting their fears of becoming assimilated into this new world.

I'm sold well, tradition and culture figure in the game, not just as an

object to be protected, but also as a positive force that itself protects

the family and the restaurant.

And we also have paper towels.

They're fake paper, talismans.

I'm air quoting right now with my fingers, but, uh, fake paper tells

mins that characters will write on.

So they will come together as a family and write out a family motto,

which will keep them safe from the juncture so that when they.

Use the spell.

When they use these pieces of paper, they can stick them on the junction and they'll

freeze them in place and hopefully giving them enough time to carry out their plan.

A campaign in juncture is a series of one shots collected

into an anthology or mini series.

Bananas background as a small box games, designer shines here in

junctures clear and unique objective.

None of the player characters actually die.

If you turn into a drunk shoe, you can turn back.

The only way for the players to quote unquote lose is if they,

their restaurant takes on so much damage that it falls into disrepair.

And then the restaurant closes because the restaurant itself actually acts

as a character kind of as well.

It's got eight slots on the board and when things get covered up by

undone chores, it goes into disrepair.

Using this restaurant board, you go about your day using the day

cycles and like the night cycles.

So in the daytime, you're acting out the day scenes, you have to do your chores.

You have to, you know, make sure that the customers are happy and that night

the junk should come out and you have to defend the restaurant from these juncture.

And also we'll make sure that you get some rest for the next day.

And every day you get a pool of dice on the first day.

Maybe you have like five to eight.

And the second day, as you're getting more stressed out one day, it gets taken out.

And so you have to roll from 40 eights, a pool of 40 eights, and then

the next day you have three D AIDS.

And then finally on the last day, maybe you have two DA's and that's

like the least amenity it's.

You can have a for this game.

So, if I were to thumbnail this, I would say in the same way that

shadow run has a D six dice pool.

Juncture has a D eight dice.

Yeah.

And we decided to use DAS because the number eight is, um, it's

lucky and Chinese culture.

Yeah, so it's very thematic.

And, uh, if you roll any fours, the fours cancel it.

The highest number because the number four is bad luck and similar to the word death.

So that's why we decided to have before is be like, you know, the number

that cancels out the highest number, and then the next highest number

would be the outcome to the role.

And Mandarin, it would be, ER, I'm sure.

Uh, and so in Cantonese, because my Mandarin is terrible in Cantonese,

the number four would sound like, say, and to die is say so for Cantonese,

the word juncture would be gung.

See, it would be different from say and say, so, yeah.

When you say Chinatown, are you thinking of one Chinatown in particular?

So the base game is actually in it's based on off of San Francisco's Chinatown,

because that's one of the first train of towns that, that happens during

the, I believe like the 18 hundreds, but, uh, we have a few different

Chinatowns that players can choose from and a few different ventures as well.

So they don't necessarily have to be in a Chinatown.

So we have San Francisco and Los Angeles by Ross churn.

He's doing both of those.

And then we have New York by Kiana Shaw and we have Vancouver

and Toronto by Daniel Kwan.

Amazing.

So that's five, five Chinatowns that you can choose from, but also

with the adventures, if you are.

Say, uh, playing a or from Yoshi Creelman, uh, Yoshi, Romans writing

one on, uh, Japanese interment camps.

So using that as a setting, uh, we also have Carl pure Lewis.

Who's using a setting that's based off of a Haitian American community.

Yeah, so there's a lot.

So in this moment, everything that we've done, the session

zero, we've set up the board.

We've rolled out these characters sheets in this moment.

What do you want people to be feeling.

So there are two different tones that we have set up for this game.

So the first tone that we're taking on is a more serious, scary, you

know, creepy vibe, sort of similar to, you know, the terrorist season too.

It's like a weird, creepy, like what's going on type of ghost story.

And then the other vibe.

Is a sillier vibe, which is something that is used a lot in Cantonese horror movies.

For example, the spooky bunch is one of the movies that I've talked about

before, where the characters are in like a pretty silly situation, even

though there were faced with ghosts.

Um, and if you've never seen the spooky bunch, uh, first of

all, do definitely check it out.

And second of all, I like to think of it sort of like a Bob's burgers

meets vampires type scenario.

All right.

Well, it's on the list.

The young HSA are exactly the kind of monster I was hoping to find when

I started this project, a way of understanding and interacting with

important issues that fosters real conversation and community sure.

Are there manifestation of the racism and the oppression

and all the things that the.

Characters at the time were dealing with, so the Chinese immigrant family,

they were dealing with like a lot of, a lot of stress from all these

different systemic issues and Sen and I were hoping that the juncture

would be like this, um, this physical manifestation of all of these things.

Uh, but.

It's not just, uh, it's not just the scary stuff.

Right.

Um, it's also like the silly stuff, which we tried to make light of, not in

the sense that we're trying to dampen it or anything, but trying to make it.

Feel a little more hopeful so that it's family friendly and

it's a little more approachable.

So when we're talking about racism or, you know, oppression, it's a little easier

to understand when players try to grapple with these with these sensitive times.

I mean, I never asked you to write an essay about whether racism is a zombie,

but I might play this game with you and ask is racism a zombie though?

And you know exactly what I was talking about.

What is doing it in this way, add to the conversation.

I think that there are two things, right?

So, because it's set in the 1920s, we do have a little bit of separation

in terms of time and period.

So, because it's something that's already happened, you can sort

of take a look at all this stuff that's happened historically, like

in books or in the tax itself.

Um, The timeline describes, like all the things that have happened, including

like the Chinese exclusion act.

I think that that separation with the time period allows for, for

people to like, Digestible easier.

And then the second way is that we added these horror elements

because, or quote, unquote horror.

They can be silly if you want them to be silly, but we add the horror

element because that adds another layer of separation where it's like,

okay, you know, I understand that all this stuff is happening, but.

It still feels like we're building a story together.

We're, you know, sort of like watching a movie, we're not actually

encountering these things in real life, even though we are like, we

still are encountering like, you know, impression or, you know, systemic race.

We still have a safe space to sort of play in and understand more

about what's happening in the world.

Banana.

I'm so glad you came on the podcast.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to get to.

I knew it.

I'm glad if you're as excited it is.

I am about as young ship blood in the banquet hall, you can find

links to everything you need to know@theepisodepageonscintilla.studio

slash monster, including beautiful illustrations.

Full color cover art banana has also made available a nine page short story written

in the Chinatowns setting of young HSA and in the style of an actual play podcast.

And you can get it by trusting me with your email address.

There's going to be a lot more extras like this as making a

monster progresses, and I'm excited to share them with you that way.

Juncture blood in the banquet hall is live on Kickstarter until Thursday,

August 13th, and a backer kit will be available on that page for late pledges.

If you're also listening to this in the future.

Follow wet ink games and game, and a Curry on Facebook, Twitter, and

Instagram to stay completely up to date on the games, retail distribution.

Right now, John should blend the bank at home.

We'll be on Kickstarter on July.

14th would be a 30 day Kickstarter.

I think it ends on August 13th, but afterwards, once production goes out

and everything, we should be able to get in stores through distribution,

as long as everything is fine, you know, like as long as covert doesn't

mess things up some more right.

All those links are on the show's website at scintilla.studio/monster.

Making a monster is produced by me, Lucas Zellers.

And if you want to support the show, the best thing to do right

now is rate and review the podcast wherever you happen to be listening,

it really helps other listeners.

Trust me, take a chance on this show.

Next time on making a monster.

Sorry, my DMV design process on a series of ventures called fear of workers.

I wanted to make a villain who doesn't put out a ton of damage.

She's not super beefy, but she takes allies.

She'll take your group of characters.

If you come into her layer five zeros, she's going to turn