yeah, I do not get that, most everything in fantasy is influenced to almost straight up lifted from history and regions on Earth. I mean, they recently did Southlands and if you do not recognize Egypt / Africa in there, then I cannot help you
I'm speculating, but I think the difference was that during the development of Brilliant East, those 'Asians read Oriental Adventures' videos went up on Youtube, and got a hell of a lot of views and a hell of a lot of attention, and there was the whole debate with Panzerlion and Candlekeep Adventures, and KP had a a moment of introspection and a look at their pipeline and realised that Brilliant East was being majority-written by white guys, and backed away. Southlands came out before all that conversation happened, and of course was a port of the already-existing Southlands setting for Pathfinder 1, so maybe got a bit more of a pass. Even so, they very deliberately brought in a couple of developers with Middle Eastern/African backgrounds for the 5e Southlands project.
What was the debate around Candlekeep Adventures?
Quick summary, Graeme Barber wrote the initial draft and turned it over to Wizards for playtesting with permission to let them make changes without contacting him. He acknowledges he didn't understand the process and assumed they'd still follow up if there were significant changes, so was surprised when the final version was missing major context, turned into a more linear adventure and had introduced what he viewed as problematic descriptions of Grippli as "primitive" and Yuan-ti as more evil for the sake of evil rather than having clear motivations. Due to the level of changes he's asked not to be associated with it.
Oh, that. I do remember that. I had been more focused on the clash of expectations between a freelancer and a publisher, rather than what was done to the Grippli and Yuan-Ti.
