Monday Musings #127 🤬
Musing on Birthdays and Jiangshi
Good Monday, Gamer!
“I just wanna bang on the drum all day” — Todd Rundgren
This week marks a milestone in the house: Maxwell (FKA Max) turns 18.
A whole young adult, right here under my roof — and with three days off from school to celebrate. His birthday ask is simple, so I’m adding a little extra: a D&D Birthday One-Shot for him and his gaming friends.
We’re planning to rent a private room at Tabletop Game & Hobby (our FLGS), hire a local dungeon master with way more 5E mileage than I’ve got, and round out the table with myself and a couple of friends who’ve adventured with Max over the years.
Why am I not running it?
Because if I get this right, the gift is the experience — the pro-DM, fully-handled “birthday one-shot adventure” feeling. I can run him D&D any time. This one should just be pure joy…and maybe there’ll be a spot for me to PLAY!
Playing
Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall — One-Shot
I finally got to play Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, a horror-comedy RPG by Banana Chan and Sen-Foong Lim. It’s a game about Chinese immigrant families running restaurants in 1920s America while also dealing with jiangshi — hopping vampires drawn from Chinese folklore. It’s heartfelt, funny, generational, tragic, and chaotic in the best possible way.
I played Liam Zhu Cho, mother of two daughters and a granddaughter, all working together to keep the Cho Pagoda Restaurant alive. We’re famous for our noodles and our new mobile food cart aka “Chuck Wagon.”
4 players and a GM. We ran the session on Roll20, which supports the game nicely. I have the boxed set — and let me tell you, the physical components are incredible: cards, tokens, table aids, and an overall presentation that radiates love.
The game runs in two cycles:
Daytime: juggling restaurant work, family responsibilities, reputation, and finances.
Nighttime: when the hopping vampires come scratching at the doors… and all your daytime successes suddenly matter.
We were managing the challenges nicely…until grandma critically failed to barricade the Jiangshi. We’re all Jiangshi now!
Prepping
🌀 The Anadyomene Artifact — Hard Zone (AW: Burned Over)
The second hardzone in play for my AW:BO series —coming to a strem near you!
Before humanity ever reached the Kuiper Belt, something ancient was waiting — frozen in ice, patient as time. When the Anadyomene Pulse hit the solar system, the shockwave didn’t come from the Artifact… it came through it.
Now it’s surfacing.
Power spikes, static whispers, and glitchy tech.
Geometry shifts like breathing.
Explorers call it a derelict. The devout call it a god.
Either way, everything else in the Belt now orbits its heartbeat.
The Locations
The Outer Hull
Miles of self-healing black alloy. Salvagers cut entry points that seal themselves by morning.
The Echo Gates
Endless looping corridors where voices arrive before the speaker. Shadows on their own schedules.
The Spire
A vertical cathedral of crystal machinery. It hums like a pulse. It dreams in borrowed memories.
The Breach
The main wound — scaffolds, memorials, derelict pods. A thousand expeditions begin and end here.
The Back Door
A quiet access tunnel on the farside of the hull. Stable readings, unstable implications. Some swear it leads to a mirrored world.
CQ
The staging camp, marketplace, and political powder keg for every crew on-site.
The Well
A bottomless gravity inversion shaft. Drones vanish; some return, transmitting your voice.
The Memory Sea
Liquid thought. Reflects forgotten or impossible memories.
🛠 WIP
Some projects don’t die — they simply wait for the right re-roll.
TinyCon is one of mine.
If you’ve been here long enough, you might remember the early sketches: Warhorn was sunsetting, alternatives were in question…the gaming world needed a hero!!
It was us. The Kickstarter didn’t land. Life happened. But interest never fully stopped — organizers and sponsors stayed in touch, checking in now and then. And the devs at Digital Gnomes kept tinkering quietly.
TinyCon is officially back on the workbench.
A management app for running small game days, micro-cons, housecons and weekend meetups without wrestling with bloated software or a stack of spreadsheets. We’ll live in the roomy space Tabletop.Events and Warhorn.
We’re planning 1–2 private pilot events over the holiday season, and I’ll share more once they’re underway. Because these tables — these strange little gatherings — they deserve software made with care. With an understanding that the real future of the hobby isn’t the expo hall… it’s the thousand tiny conventions happening every weekend, online and off.
More soon. Lots to show.
As always, thanks for reading, sharing, and building strange worlds with me.
Catch ya next week!
Happy Birthday to your (not so, but still) little one!!