First of all: my apologies. I'm not japanese. You may call me an otaku, if you will. So this is not (and doesn't want to be) an accurate recreation of japanese myth and folklore. I hope this does not offend anyone!
Lately I became fascinated with the concept of reskin. I did the same thing with my Age of Sigmar army (Undead Pirates aka Legions of Nagash with a nautical theme) and I'm about to apply this concept to D&D. Because, why create something that can be approximated with something already existing? That's what I'm going to do right here, right now.
Settings are, more often than not, defined by those who inhabit them; this means, from a player's standpoint, playable races and classes. Fantasy Japan (as I'm going to call it for the sake of brevity) needs more than humans, so I started to dig. Folklore says that there are two kinds of "mythical creatures": kami and yokai. As I understand it, this distinction is not strictly between good and evil, but more between divine and otherwordly (also, sometimes some yokai can also be considered kami, like the tengu). Divinity is something that is defined by its distance to humanity, while otherwordly is another story. Tieflings are otherwordly and yet they are tangible, present; the same is to creatures like eladrins, kalashtars, aasimars... Looking among the ranks of the yokai (thank you wikipedia) I picked some of them that could be played as already existing races:
As for classes, yeah the Samurai Fighter and Way of the Shadow Monk work well. But that's not it! If we consider the classes presented in the PHB and XGtE, we could extract this list:
-Barbarian: Path of the Berserker/Totem Warrior/Ancestral Guardian
-Bard: College of Lore/Valor/Whispers
-Cleric: I would say that the concept of a cleric is too much a western idea and so it doesn't apply well in this setting.
-Druid: sadly, also the concept of druids is too much western.
-Fighter: all fighters, with the exception of the Eldritch Knight and the Arcane Archer, appear to be quite fitting.
-Monk: all of them. Some of them could also take the mantle of the cleric for what concerns faith (this is more on the buddhist side of the religious spectrum, than shintoist).
-Paladin: this is tricky. Paladins in previous editions used to be linked to gods, but this is no more the case in 5e, where they can also swear oaths to ideals or concepts. I would like to think about them more, even have some discussion, before making a definitive call.
-Ranger: surprisingly, they all fit in this Fantasy Japan.
-Rogue: all of them, even the Arcane Trickster (which could be a different take on a magical ninja).
-Sorcerer: Draconic Bloodline/Divine Soul/Shadow Magic.
-Warlock: all but the Great Old One Otherwordly Patron.
-Wizard: too western, sorry.
All backgrounds seem to work well, so no problem on that side.
Then there are monsters. I'm not going to analyze all of them, but I would surely utilize incorporeal undeads (
Ghosts,
Specters,
Wraiths, all of them would be called
yurei), animals (
snakes,
baboons,
bears,
deers,
boars and so on), fiends (which could be other yokai) and dragons (they should be reskinned, because oriental dragons are much different from western dragons). There are more obviously, consider this just a primer.
I hope this is a solid start for your adventures in Fantasy Japan!
Be kind to each other.
Daniele
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