Orientalist Fantasy Settings

[Username17]

So there's been recent discussion of Exalted and Rokugan, and how both of these settings are honestly pretty terrible at being settings for roleplaying games. And yet, despite the acknowledged terribleness of the settings and the associated rules systems, we keep talking about them. And I would suggest that this is because Orientalist Fantasy is a thing that people genuinely want, and is a thing that should definitely exist.

It seems reasonable to discuss what the problems and issues there are of Orientalist Fantasy. And to kick things off, I think it's important to discuss what one of the problems isn't. And that's "power level." There's oriental flavored source material where characters are basically gods and there is oriental flavored source material where characters are basically high school students and sometimes those are the same pieces of source material after doing a zero-to-hero story arc. Sailor Moon begins the story near the bottom of her junior high school class academically and her athletic performance is merely adequate and marred by clumsiness and ADHD. And of course in a later portion of the story she resurrects six billion people from the dead because she is very angry and sad. An RPG can tell stories at either end of the power spectrum, or something in between. It's a complete non-issue.

The Fire Nation Problem


If you asked whether it was reasonable "in setting" for a Dungeons & Dragons Fighter and Wizard to adventure together, people would look at you like you had an extra head. One of the key insights of Gygax that allowed this hobby to exist at all was the notion that players were going to want to play different characters and that as such those different characters had to be assumed to be reasonably expected to work and travel together.

This compares quite sharply with later games like Vampire, where the character's concept and role often came prepackaged with a faction affiliation which in turn made it very difficult to have the different players at the table tell stories with an ensemble cast made from characters in the world. If Fire Benders are inherently expected to be "the bad guys" from the perspective of Water Benders (and vice versa) it makes it very difficult to have a game at all if some players want to play Fire Benders and some players want to play Water Benders.

Now Gygax had a solution for this exact problem, which was to declare that you simply were not allowed to play Orcs at all. They were the "bad guys" and you couldn't play them. This was not particularly satisfying, but it beats one player bringing an Elf Ranger to the table and another player bringing an Orc Berserker to the table and then getting told that the players have to have their characters fight to the death at the start of the game. Much better is the concept that the character types are independent of faction types. Just as we could expect Rogues and Sorcerers to appear on Team Player and on Team Monster, we should be able to equally expect whatever types of orientalist character types we happen to invoke to appear with or against whatever team the player characters are assumed to be on.

Yellowface and the Racism Problem

It's fairly obvious that a cooperative storytelling game is going to involve people contributing to the story who don't have any particular knowledge of the source material that is being referenced. Indeed, even if two contributors are both very well informed it is virtually certain that when it comes to one section of the setting or another that one contributor or the other will be at least more informed about that portion of the setting. Which is a bit of a long walk to say that it is almost certain that people contributing to role playing games - whether as an author or as a player - will say things that are wrong.

Now contributions to settings and stories being wrong is not inherently a big deal. Like, it doesn't actually matter that Thanos' divide the population by two plan is idiotic even on its own terms and would accomplish essentially nothing were it to be implemented in full. But when your stories and settings reference cultures and people that have gotten something of a raw deal in the modern world, that can be offensive and terrible. Rokugan referenced the Burakumin for some fucking reason and some jackass decided to call them "Eta" which is wholly and obviously unacceptable.

More broadly, the intersection of ignorance and talking about people of color is very often people saying stupid racist shit. It just is. But while that's totally true, lack of representation is a big problem that people of color have, and avoiding discussing East Asians for fear of inadvertently saying something racist is actually doing something racist - it's excluding someone on racial grounds out of fear.

So yes an Orientalist Fantasy should do as much as it can to avoid being offensive, and it's probably going to have some wall bangers in it even so. But even so it's better to go ahead than to not do so.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Rokugan referenced the Burakumin for some fucking reason and some jackass decided to call them "Eta" which is wholly and obviously unacceptable.

If you're going for "This is absolutely feudal Japan" like Rokugan, it makes sense to mention the Burakumin exist at all. Ideally you'd want to have a thing mentioning how even they can become recognised heroes (as in, it goes without saying that even an unpersoned person can be virtuous or heroic, but it is stated that even those on the bottom rung can be promoted by their deeds and have people point at them and say "I wish I were like them"). Or you could just mention it as a thing that exists and talk about how they barely have rights and people show massive prejudice.

If your setting has snake people and rat people and crow people, you already need to mention a lot of differences between your world and "feudal Japan as seen in history books or on Wikipedia", and "hamlets of people who basically fell off the bottom rung of the caste system, whether through their fault or (typically) not" seems like the kind of thing that needs addressing. Especially seeing as they were often seen as "not real people" and it's easy for a player to assume at first glance that "not real people" would equate to "not humans" and then just assume the two are the same.

As for calling them Eta... that was a derogatory term that was used for them. If the author was basically using the term as-is and saying "these hamlets full of shit-covered miscreants and assholes unworthy of your respect, and only worthy of acknowledgement because they'll steal your belongings if you don't notice them, what a bunch of assholes" then yeah that's terrible. If the author said "a common term for these people is Eta, and that's a derogatory term" or had an in-character thing with some character saying it, then I don't see the problem.

...it was the first one, wasn't it?

[Longes]

L5R authors didn't go out of their way to disparage the Burakumin (aside from a tidbit that a Burakumin can only reincarnate into a Burakumin), and you can justify their inclusion. As a samurai interacting with Burakumin is a social equivalent of juggling turds at the dinner table so you just never do it and they get no focus in the material. Also Burakumin usually avoid samurai like the plague because they have no legal protection and can be killed by bored samurai for fun.

But.

You still shouldn't call them "Eta". It's the equivalent of making a US history RPG and saying that the 1%ers' housework is done by enslaved naggers. You should use a different word.

[Username17]

The use of "Eta" in L5R is wholly inexcusable. It's an offensive derogatory term and they use it in out-of-game text to refer to people. It's pretty much exactly as if they had written a game about the Civil War era and casually noted that some of the people in the South were "Niggers" And while AEG never did that specifically, when they did make a western game their handling of the "slavery issue" was pretty similar to that level of offensiveness.

But it's the small edge of a big problem. A lot of people in East Asia don't like each other very much. Many of the words and descriptions applied by one group of people to another group of people in East Asia are quite hateful and hurtful. You might find a Japanese text that casually refers to Koreans as "Chons" or a Chinese text that refers to Koreans as "Gaoli Bangzi" and you might seriously just not know that those terms were intentionally offensive.

It also gets a lot more subtle than that, where the descriptions of how various ethnic and class groups live and behave in primary East Asian sources is often very heavily colored by negative stereotypes. Descriptions and depictions of Manchurians in Chinese literature and movies are very often the rough equivalent of Cletus from the Simpsons as a depiction of American Appalachians. It's actually something of a mine field, where even things as innocuous as descriptions of what various people eat are often peppered with negative stereotypes (the equivalent in America of black people eating watermelons or white southerners eating roadkill possum).

Now to a very real extent, that's OK. I mean, obviously negative racial stereotypes are bad, but representation is important. Mexican American kids fucking love Speedy Gonzalez despite the fact that obviously those cartoons are full of negative stereotypes of Mexicans. Because representation is really important and being erased is very upsetting.

Bottom line: you're probably going to stick your foot in it many times as you grab things from various Asian cultures and media properties because there's a lot of nuance and bitter history that as a white person you aren't going to pick up on. The important part is how you react to having this shit brought to your attention. The correct thing to do is offer a mild but sincere apology and quietly change it moving forward. Dungeons & Dragons can continue despite having had "Pygmies" in the monster manual because they simply stopped doing that when people pointed out that they had monster listings for racist depictions of black people.

The Need For Blank Space

Any RPG setting needs blank space so that the various players can add content to the cooperative story being told. For Orientalist fantasy, that need is significantly greater. Simply put, East Asia is a big place which has had a lot of history and a lot of legends and myths and shit for a long time. And most of the English speaking audience won't be familiar with more than a tiny sliver of that source material. And the source material they are familiar with won't necessarily overlap all that much.

Which means that you're going to want and need a lot of space that isn't filled in so that people can fill that in with stuff they want based on the source material that's important to them - keeping in mind that the authors of the setting are likely not going to be familiar with it all.

So to give an Avatar example: obviously the original show is really good and the Legend of Kora is basically just OK and the live action movie is a human centipede of terrible; but it rather lacks as a role playing setting in any case because there isn't a lot to do. The fact that there are definitely only four nations is a big problem for the creation of custom content. People are going to want to bring in Cambodian and Thai sensibilities or even just stuff from different eras of China and Korea that they happen to be more familiar with. And within the context of Avatar that would imply the existence of Shadow Bending and Wood Bending and shit.

Or to give an L5R example: people are going to want to do shit with Tengu and Kappa and shit. And also again and still they are going to want to have characters with food and clothing styles from elsewhere in East Asia or even just elsewhere in time. Maybe someone just really likes Nara Period Japan. For a role playing game, people need unwritten "major clans" so that if they really want to have outfits from other historical locations or other East Asian cultures on their samurai warriors they can do that.

-Username17

[K]

You could scrub a lot of the nasty parts of cultural appropriation and slurs out by just using different words that aren't real or faux Asian language words, and thus have a lot of baggage stripped out.

So you'd never get to use "gaijin" again, but calling people "Outlanders" is perfectly fine and no one is insulted. As long as you made a choice to do it consistently with everything in the setting from personal names to classes in the setting, I think you could get away with Asian-inspired things like flower-themed thrones and honor-bound warrior castes following a not-Zen and not-Bushido. You'd have to take it all the way to make it work, so even harmless things have to be renamed: crow people couldn't be called kenku and no one is named "Akira" or "Chen".

Some flavor is definitely lost, certainly, but I always liked the translation "man of the waves" far more than more than the word "ronin".

[deaddmwalking]

Maybe this is the Tolkien influence, but I'd like to see a lexicon of 300 common words. If it ends up being dumb, people won't use it, but it can make things appear 'fantastic'. That's what Planescape did, berk.

[Longes]

Maybe this is the Tolkien influence, but I'd like to see a lexicon of 300 common words. If it ends up being dumb, people won't use it, but it can make things appear 'fantastic'. That's what Planescape did, berk.

Planescape just used obscure British slang like "berk". And it wasn't successful, because much like with Shadowrun, the number of fantasy words anyone used was single-digit.

[deaddmwalking]

If you have it available and you choose not to use it, it doesn't hurt anything. A few hundred dwarven or elven words (and then using them in things like place names for your published setting) is cool.

Maybe nobody bothers to figure out that 'Flauvivia' actually means 'vale of flowing water', but using language to help build consistency - or apparent consistency - in the setting is a useful tool.

If most people know the words and it's useful, they'll probably adopt them. If you don't have a Ninja class, but you do have a Shouwa, and it ends up meaning basically the same thing, people will use it.

[Username17]

You could scrub a lot of the nasty parts of cultural appropriation and slurs out by just using different words that aren't real or faux Asian language words, and thus have a lot of baggage stripped out.

So you'd never get to use "gaijin" again, but calling people "Outlanders" is perfectly fine and no one is insulted. As long as you made a choice to do it consistently with everything in the setting from personal names to classes in the setting, I think you could get away with Asian-inspired things like flower-themed thrones and honor-bound warrior castes following a not-Zen and not-Bushido. You'd have to take it all the way to make it work, so even harmless things have to be renamed: crow people couldn't be called kenku and no one is named "Akira" or "Chen".

Some flavor is definitely lost, certainly, but I always liked the translation "man of the waves" far more than more than the word "ronin".

That's a little far. I mean, it's completely OK to use the French word for Ogres, the German word for Trolls, and the English word for Stone Giants. But you wouldn't call people in your fantasy world "Basques" or "Bosniaks" - let alone "Kikes" or "Psheky." It's probably OK to call bird people Tengu or Kenku, but it isn't OK to call your fantasy people "Ragyabpa" or "Dalits."

Where things get a little gray are words like "Samurai" and "Ninja." Obviously, those are terms that define real people, but they are also basically English words. And when people ask to play an Orientalist Fantasy Cooperative Storytelling Game, chances are good that they'll use terms like Samurai and Ninja in their description of the character they want to play. But according to Google the Vietnamese word for Knight/Samurai is "hiệp sỹ" and I definitely do not suggest that it would be a particularly good idea to call warriors from the Serpent Clan that. Similarly, I don't think there's any benefit to be had in finding some non-English word for Wizard. Like, we could call these guys "Shugenja" or "Onmyoji" or "Thuật sĩ" or "Mavosa" or "Wujen" or whatever, but I think the value added in doing that is negative.

You can use the Korean word for Shaman or the Mandarin word for Alchemist or something, but I think these kinds of choices will carry implications that you don't mean. Indeed, implications that you don't know about. Shamanism in your orientalist fantasy setting works however the fuck the game mechanics say it works, and using a Korean word implies all kinds of references to Korean traditional spirituality that I don't understand and probably most of the other potential authors don't understand. But you are going to want to steal liberally from various source material from various East Asian cultures in precisely the same way that the D&D Monster Manual raids Greek and Germanic myths. And you're going to need to leave yourself a lot of blank space to make that possible.

To give a solid example about the need for blank space, let's talk about Bird People. Wikipedia has a list of Avian Humanoids, and it mentions a few things you might want to talk about such as the Garuda of Thailand, Kinnari of Cambodia, and Tengu of Japan. But there are Mongolian Eagle-People, and not only do I not know what they are called, they don't even appear in the Wikipedia list! And there are other creatures like the Korean Immyeonjo that have Wikipedia entries but don't appear on the Wikipedia list of bird people.

Personally, I think having Mongolian Eagle Riders is really cool. And it would be reasonable for someone who knew more Mongolian folk stories than I do to want to put in the Mongolian Eagle People. And that's the kind of thing that there should be room for.

-Username17

[K]

Not using the word "tengu" doesn't mean that you can't steal liberally from the stories and culture that inspired it, but it does cleanse your inevitable hamfisted take on that culture.

You are going to fuck it up. That's the world we live in now, where no one can lift cultural elements wholesale regardless of how many doctorate-level advisors they have on staff. You are going to get scandals like we saw in the Lone Ranger remake, or The Last Airbender live-action movie, or the mess in any ttRPG book with a historical setting (White Wolf being the most prominent offender).

You have to file ALL the serial numbers off. You have to go full James Cameron Avatar where you can't tell if his source material is Dances with Wolves or Fern Gully.

[Korwin]

Not using the word "tengu" doesn't mean that you can't steal liberally from the stories and culture that inspired it, but it does cleanse your inevitable hamfisted take on that culture.

Not shure about that, if you use Tengu and others known terms you get name recognition, which might help in generating interest in your game.


If you use generic or new words, it might come around too bland.

[Longes]

Not using the word "tengu" doesn't mean that you can't steal liberally from the stories and culture that inspired it, but it does cleanse your inevitable hamfisted take on that culture.

Not shure about that, if you use Tengu and others known terms you get name recognition, which might help in generating interest in your game.


If you use generic or new words, it might come around too bland.

The issue K approaches is that currently "cultural appropriation" is a hot topic and making a game that's not about anglo-american fantasy is asking for trouble. Because you absolutely have people give blood and soil takes about you being the wrong ethnicity and you have twitter mobs taking YA authors for being the wrong kind of American (see "Blood Heir").

[maglag]

Doesn't the saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Besides it's one of the oldest habits of humankind. Cultures copy cool stuff from each other when they meet and we all profit from it. Like Anime started by imitating western cartoons and ended up becoming its own great thing, that then started being copied back by western animators for other great stuff too.

[Longes]

Doesn't the saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Besides it's one of the oldest habits of humankind. Cultures copy cool stuff from each other when they meet and we all profit from it. Like Anime started by imitating western cartoons and ended up becoming its own great thing, that then started being copied back by western animators for other great stuff too.

It's complicated. Especially because people who will mostly engage with you as critics are not Japanese, Chinese, Korean people whose stories you are trying to mimic but Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Korean-Americans.

[Thaluikhain]

Not using the word "tengu" doesn't mean that you can't steal liberally from the stories and culture that inspired it, but it does cleanse your inevitable hamfisted take on that culture.

Second that, you get a lot more wiggle room.

For that matter, it doesn't just let you get things wrong and say "I meant to do that", it lets you mean to do that. Even if you perfectly understand the concept, you are probably going to want to use something that isn't exactly that in your game anyway.

[shinimasu]

Doesn't the saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Besides it's one of the oldest habits of humankind. Cultures copy cool stuff from each other when they meet and we all profit from it. Like Anime started by imitating western cartoons and ended up becoming its own great thing, that then started being copied back by western animators for other great stuff too.

It's a nuanced issue. Cultural appropriation is something that affects immigrants and the children of immigrants more than it affects the people actually living in the countries you're borrowing from. Being PoC in America means having a very complicated relationship with your culture of origin, it means being shamed for "not assimilating" when you wear your country's fashions or eat your country's food, and it can be maddening when those same people will go around picking up the trendy bits of your culture with no regard for the deeper tradition behind it. When an Indian girl wears a Bindi she faces ridicule from her peers. When a white instagram yoga enthusiast wears a bindi she's being "spiritual." Is it really a surprise then that those Indian women would then want to do the cultural equivalent of "Well if you can't play nicely with my things you can't have them."

So the line between representation and exploitation gets murkier. I would tend to agree that filing the serial numbers off entirely might be the way to go here. But I also agree with Frank's assessment that it's a pain in the ass to invent and then have to explain what your fantasy name for ninja or samurai is when the current words exist and are already evocative. And that there's nothing inherently "appropriating" about using them as is. On the flip side those are also very specifically Japanese words and nothing will nettle my friends from China or Korea more than people mashing Asia up into one homogeneous stew.

[Lokey]

For that matter, what kind of setting does DnD or VtM have? What kind of draw is that for the games--I know we've been over the latter recently after all?

K's answer: file off all the serial numbers, I think it depends. You want your group to be able to approach the material from a pretty similar direction. If half of your group sees peasants as disposable as the L5R setting seems to and other other half is wondering why they can't play a geisha or fisherman, there's going to be too many things going clunk to get into a good game space...or at least it'll have to go klunk in an interesting way.

Perhaps it's similar with the lazy type of slur we're talking about here (did no research beyond watching the magnificent seven). Such things shouldn't be there, if made by most of us they wouldn't be... I'll have to think about, could probably couch in terms of Redneck Trump Supporter the game for example.

[maglag]

Doesn't the saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Besides it's one of the oldest habits of humankind. Cultures copy cool stuff from each other when they meet and we all profit from it. Like Anime started by imitating western cartoons and ended up becoming its own great thing, that then started being copied back by western animators for other great stuff too.

It's a nuanced issue. Cultural appropriation is something that affects immigrants and the children of immigrants more than it affects the people actually living in the countries you're borrowing from. Being PoC in America means having a very complicated relationship with your culture of origin, it means being shamed for "not assimilating" when you wear your country's fashions or eat your country's food, and it can be maddening when those same people will go around picking up the trendy bits of your culture with no regard for the deeper tradition behind it. When an Indian girl wears a Bindi she faces ridicule from her peers. When a white instagram yoga enthusiast wears a bindi she's being "spiritual." Is it really a surprise then that those Indian women would then want to do the cultural equivalent of "Well if you can't play nicely with my things you can't have them."

That honestly just sounds like a classic case of "People make fun of me when I do X but think it's cool when cool kid does X", which applies to any X regardless of being culture specific or not.

But turns out it doesn't really matter what X is, what matters more is the person doing it. A charismatic person can make virtually anything look great, while a non-charismatic person...

For example I used to belong to a Kyudo club that started with a middle-aged local dude that happened to notice his new neighbour was a retired Kyudo master that had moved to our country as his retirement vacation and the local dude begged the old master to teach him and the old master eventually accepted and then more locals started to join the lessons too and organizing events and a good time was had by all for many years until the old master got too old and returned to his hometown to die. Nobody ever made fun of our japanese master for his fancy food and clothing habit because he was just that stylish. We all respected him pretty deeply, for he was an actual master of his art that had actually grown up and lived most of his life in Japan teaching and practising Kyudo and the related rituals for a living. He knew what he was doing, he breathed it.

However an "indian" girl that was born in the USA and grew up in the USA and only learned about indian stuff through second-experience from her parents that most probably aren't trained experts in indian culture... Does the thought not cross her mind that maybe she's just doing it wrong and the other person in instagram is just more charismatic and stylish than her?

[shinimasu]

It's more complicated because it ties into the already entrenched biases Americans have when it comes to brown people. Your dojo is kind of a poor sample size for this too because you're all there to learn from the guy. That doesn't mean he never faced discrimination for his habits or that his life was free of ridicule outside of that class.

It's the kind of thing that's hard to understand until you've lived somewhere you're the minority. I have very thick curly hair, when I studied abroad in Japan I had people coming up to just touch it. Like no warning just some stranger's hand in my hair. My blond transfers reported similar treatment. It was uncomfortable and off putting and I remember thinking "wow we would never do this in America" but that's not true. Black people have strangers up in their hair far more often than anyone should. Pregnant women are subject to strangers grabbing their stomachs without consent.

So it's not in a vacuum that the Bindi thing happens. It happens against a larger backdrop of "Your culture is only allowed when I say it's allowed and also you are more of a curiosity than a person with autonomy." I'm not saying cultural osmosis can't happen or that it's a bad thing but it's also good to make sure you're not doing the commercial equivalent of grabbing someone's hair.

Edit: I also want to spotlight artist Takashi Murakami while we're on the subject because a lot of his work grapples with themes of Western influence on Japanese animation and the sublimation of tradition to imitation. Featuring less than subtle depictions of be-fanged mickey mouse-esque mascots in bright colors.

[Longes]

It's the kind of thing that's hard to understand until you've lived somewhere you're the minority.

I think a lot of people can relate to this. It's not just an ethnic minority thing - you can look at things like "gentrification" of nerd hobbies like comic books and video games*
My main issue is that I have no idea how to respond to this. Gatekeeping and tumblr-style ramblings are pointless. They are malicious and powerless to stop the global processes at work. But what else can you do? Just sigh and accept that things be that way?

* Though video games are their own bizarre scenario. The hobby is one of the most mainstream pastimes in the world, but the discourse surrounding it still happens as if we were in the 90s and "gamers" was a more useful grouping than "movie goers" or "book readers". Gaming media being full of malicious shitweasels doesn't help either.

[shinimasu]

I think it's important to ask the question "Who is this for?"

Is your game for a predominantly western market and predominantly western players? File the serial numbers off, go full avatar. Tone and Theme are more important than accuracy in this space.

Is your game a good faith effort to try and represent oft overlooked mythologies and trope specific to this culture? Then hire a couple sensitivity readers and maybe hone in on one culture in specific. Introduce neighboring regions as separate splats as time/money allow. Trying to do a deep dive into ALL of Asia at once in one setting is where the biggest problems come up. Korea alone has enough in it for its own Fantasy RPG counterpart. Trying to do Korea/China/Mongolia/Japan in the fantasy blender is pushing it.

[Longes]

Is your game a good faith effort to try and represent oft overlooked mythologies and trope specific to this culture? Then hire a couple sensitivity readers and maybe hone in on one culture in specific.

Not necessarily that simple. Everyone hates "Memoirs of Geisha", but "The Last Samurai" is beloved in Japan and reviled in the US.

[shinimasu]

Everyone hates Memoires of a Geisha because the book was published against the wishes of the woman in questions, and heavily embellishes and in some places outright lies about her life and the customs of geisha in general. The depiction is also skewed negative because the move/book wanted to be sordid.

The last Samurai is a cheesy white savior movie that also lies about a lot of things but its lies are flattering. Its lies are like that scene in independence day where everyone is like "By god the American's have done it again!" Only replace Americans with samurai.

[Username17]

Name checking actual religions and peoples' actual gods is, I think, kind of fucked up. Doing the monster manual treatment to monsters is not.

Dominions has straight up Gandharvas and that's fine. But the Shiva analog is called "The Destroyer" and not literally named Shiva and the entire Bandar Log faction is not called "Hinduism" at any point. And that's fine. That's all the serial number filing you need to do in order to avoid the first hurdle of being blatantly disrespectful to other peoples.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Going back to source material for a moment, your original Orientalist fantasy is stuff like Vathek and 1,001 Nights - stuff that painted the Far East (and Middle East, sometimes even Near East) as this exotic land of fabulous wealth, degeneracy, culture, etc. It was a deliberate escape from the general hell that was woolen underwear and the Catholic church.

But contemporary Orientalist fantasy doesn't reach that far. We're generally talking Hong Kong wire fu cinema, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, period manga and anime dramas, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom...which is at once closer to the "real world" and still very far from the historical reality, even before you add dragons and goblins and genies.

Which is a long way to say that the context for Orientalism changes with the syntax of the times. Kindred of the East and the Year of the Lotus for White Wolf were definitely going off of contemporary ideas of what they thought readers thought they wanted, and that was a magical martial arts wonderland for furries and anime expies.