My own epic fantasy WiP, Choice of Rebels, has a Euro-esque early modern cultural setting – surprise surprise. It could have been quite different; it was based in part on a years-long D&D campaign I ran in the late '90s/early '00s which ranged through fantasy versions of China, India, and Tibet.
But while it was a lot of fun to tell, that particular rebellion-against-the-empire story was in retrospect so shot through with D&D tropes (dakini as vengeful desert elves, yeti as orcs) and orientalist cliches that the world would have been too much work to rescue.
So I retreated to what I knew I could write. As a white guy of European descent, I’m comfortable treating my own heritage with a much freer hand than I would non-European heritage. For example, the dominant religion in my gameworld is a nightmare version of my own Christianity; I’d be hesitant to write a similar nightmare fantasy Hinduism or Islam (illuminating as such a project could be in the right hands), lest I just slip into the ways that those religions have been demonized by too many past English writers.
But of course the cultural matrix and skin color don’t have to correspond. The game takes place in a sunny bit of the gameworld where you’d expect people to have rather more melanin than your average English knight. So far I’ve not made the skin tone of the MC and their friends explicit – except through reference to other more northerly bits of the world where people are pale.
I’d like to leave their particular shade of brown to the reader’s imagination, as I don’t think it would add anything necessary to a story where there’s already rather a lot going on. I just want to make sure I don’t write the story with a “white” cast – not only would that be slightly incongruous with the context, it would gratuitously add a barrier to immersion for a lot of readers.
It’s been a slight challenge for this lily-white, fantasy-steeped author to write without reference to blushing, flushing, or other white-skinned stuff, and I’m not entirely sure I’ve pulled it off. For those who can stomach the genre and setting, comment is welcome over on the XoR thread.