So, to share my related experience, I recently-ish finished a campaign set in a world where definitely-not-just-China-renamed was the dominant human culture. Most of the campaign had heavy Asian influences in the monster selection and naming. This included Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Vietnamese, etc. references. One of the big things I realized is that, for most western players, they cannot for the life of them keep up with anything other than the most basic of Asian names. Pretty mush the only significant cultural touchstones for Asianess were Avatar and pop culture samurai depictions. Basically, delving into the nuances of Asian mythology and culture were appreciated to some extent, but bogged the game down as I had to explain the context.
Greetings!
Very interesting, Hzilong! How many players were in your group? What kind of characters did they play? How long did this awesome Asian-themed campaign endure?
It sounds like you did an excellent job! Alas, much of a DM's labour often goes unknown, and sadly, entirely unappreciated by the players.
As you mentioned, though, our culture does absolutely nothing to familiarize our society with Asian culture in any meaningful way. I've said for years that we get "Ninjas, Samurai, and Geishas". It can be such a struggle where you essentially have to educate the players to get them up to speed. So many nuances and elements of choices--why person A does X, but not Y, is because of *culture* Players have zero understanding of the culture, so they have zero understanding of appropriate or inappropriate choices, or *why*--and further understand the pros and cons of such different choices. Even their choices that they might make are like throwing darts while blindfolded. It's probably why all of these wonderful, foreign, "Diverse" campaigns have been absolute commercial failures through the years. No, the market as a whole does not want anything radically different. They want North-Western Medieval Europe, heaped on with vanilla pudding, and nuked, again, and again. Sometimes drizzled with chocolate sauce.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK