Restaurant maintenance mashed with vampire slaying might sound like the unlikeliest combination in the world, but for game designers Banana Chan and Sen-Foong Lim, it was the perfect subject for their upcoming role-playing tabletop game, Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall.

Jiangshi puts players in the shoes of a 1920s Chinese family running a restaurant in one of North America’s Chinatowns, from San Francisco to Toronto. Players develop characters, roll dice along a board reminiscent of a restaurant table and collaborate on a shared story — a process that’s similar to a game like Dungeons & Dragons but with a significant twist. By day, they’ll have to face the racism and economic travails that many Chinese immigrants of the Roaring ’20s encountered, and at night, they’ll battle jiangshi, the hopping vampires of Chinese legend whose name in Mandarin literally means “stiff corpse.”

The game, which raised $100,688 on Kickstarter last July thanks to more than 1,700 backers, is due for a physical release this summer, though digital versions of its rulebook are already available for purchase.

In an interview with HuffPost, Chan and Lim reflected on birthing a project with rich Chinese themes in the midst of a global pandemic that ushered in an epidemic of anti-Asian racism, not to mention hardship for Chinatown businesses across North America.

“I have trouble sleeping just because I hope that nothing in this game is going to impact how people treat Asian Americans or make them think all Asian Americans are just like the characters portrayed in this game,” Chan said.

Lim agreed, adding that a major concern while developing Jiangshi was that the game would simply “open up people to play Asians as stereotypes and tropes.”

In order to circumvent this, Chan and Lim each spent a significant amount of time working with collaborators and cultural consultants to develop ideas on how to respectfully role-play as a Chinese person. The final result can be seen in the rulebook of Jiangshi, which urges players to avoid offensive accents and hackneyed notions of honor while offering up advice on what casual racism looked like in the 1920s, how to sensitively portray someone working in the service industry as well as safety tools to prevent microaggressions while playing.

This process, as well as investigating the history of discrimination against Chinese Americans, was both emotional and illuminating. Chan said she’d learned much, pointing to events like the Page Act of 1875, which effectively prohibited women from East Asian countries, particularly Chinese women, from immigrating to the U.S. under the illusion of combating prostitution. The act was followed up seven years later by the more commonly known Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all Chinese from entering the U.S. and wasn’t repealed until 1943.

Chan, who grew up in Canada and Hong Kong but now lives in the U.S., said that she knew these laws existed but “didn’t know the depth of them, or that they ended only in the past 60 to 70 years.”

“I thought that my parents wouldn’t have seen the effects of these laws, but they have, so that’s this weird feeling of, ‘This is a lot more recent than I thought it would be,’” she said.

The criticism that Jiangshi initially received from other Asian Americans was another notable development, Lim said, pointing out that the “Asian community in role-playing games has been bitten an awful lot.”

One of the earliest and most famous instances was the 1985 Dungeons & Dragons book “Oriental Adventures,” which offered rules for playing a ninja and samurai in the fantasy game and has long been criticized as presenting a stereotypical, one-dimensional picture of Asians.

“We have to understand that diaspora is different between different parts of the world, and the most amazing thing to me was that even though the first recorded Chinese person in Britain got there in the 1600s, it wasn’t until 1980, just in preparation of the handover of Hong Kong, when the U.K. saw a massive influx of Chinese people,” Lim said.

He added that he and Chan had “100-odd years of padding” separating them from the systemic racism that had forced many early Chinese immigrants in North America to sequester in Chinatowns, but the Jiangshi team had heard from a Chinese person in the U.K. who pointed out it had been only three decades since their extended family had faced such prejudice.

“This is the experience that we’re writing — the Chinese American and Chinese Canadian experience dealing with restaurants,” Lim said when asked about his response to this critique, which ultimately helped make the game more nuanced. “If that’s not your experience because you immigrated to, say Indonesia or Britain or somewhere else, this game is still written for you, just not about you. And that’s the kind of line we had to toe.”

Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall toes another interesting line: Between telling family restaurant tales, a la TV’s “Bob’s Burgers,” it makes sudden turns into the realm of horror. The unorthodox combination of genres is similar to the “Mr. Vampire” series of Hong Kong films that popularized jiangshi in the 1980s and ’90s with a blend of terror and goofiness. For both Chan and Lim, the desire to explore this mix came from intergenerational family memories and an interest in old myths.

“The best family moments I ever had was when all of us were making dumplings or going out to banquets together,” Chan said, reflecting on experiences with her grandparents and extended relatives. “The mythology I took for granted watching TV in Hong Kong. Now is when I’m most interested in it because I’m not seeing as much of it anymore, and I feel like I should be absorbing all of it.”

Jiangshi encourages participants to create a cast encompassing many different ages, with some playing as elders — who possibly know traditional methods of combating jiangshi — and others as second- or third-generation family members who may struggle to balance familial responsibilities with their own aspirations. The game asks players to develop hopes and dreams for their characters to exemplify this overarching intergenerational narrative. Even the restaurant setting was selected for a reason.

“We chose restaurants very specifically because we both like food but also because there’s something about food that talks to love and affection in Asian families,” said Lim, who lives in Canada but has family of Chinese descent from Malaysia and Brunei. He reflected on how his father, “a very stoic person” who rarely mentioned love, always gave him the best cut of meat growing up.

Despite their game’s emphasis on family, ironically neither Chan nor Lim have been able to truly share the victory of developing Jiangshi amid a tumultuous year with their parents. Both have felt a lack of encouragement for their side careers in game design, with Chan saying that her parents urge her to not quit her day job and “don’t really understand that I’m making money off of games.” Lim, meanwhile, doesn’t share game news with his “very old-school traditional Chinese” parents at all.

Nevertheless, the minds behind Jiangshi hope that their project will usher in other games from creators of color, as well as general support for Asian-backed endeavors.

“This is a piece of really personal work for both of us,” Chan said. “Not like we come from a long line of vampire hunters or anything like that, but the fact that we’re putting a lot of our personal history into this thing. It’s important for us to have the consumers know that it’s good you’re supporting this game, but it’d be even better if you supported the people around you and the Asian American community in general by going to businesses, donating and doing whatever you can.”

Above all, Chan and Lim want their game to resonate with everyone — regardless of ethnicity or vampire hunting skills — and offer an understanding of how countries like the U.S. and Canada have always been powered by immigrants.

“You may recognize your own family’s history in terms of how important it is to think about the generations that came before, your cultural foods and all those hopes and dreams they had for you,” Lim said. “Hopefully Jiangshi will create empathy for the Asian diaspora and for humans in general, because we all have these same but different experiences.”