Historical pastiches in setting design.

Working on my 5e setting I sort of found my self drifting toward some resemblances to a historical period and a particular region as well as the cultures in it. I personally don't find this to be a bad thing, we all borrow and steal liberally from what we know. However I have seen quite a few people over the years bitch about having game world cultures be thinly veiled copies of an actual culture. So where is the line here? At what point does heavily inspired by become "filing the serial numbers off"?



To my mind a good deal of borrowing from historical cultures is unavoidable for most of us. Most people don't have the time to sit down and really work this sort of thing out in a wholly unique fashion, which I am not even sure can be done in the first place. Even with settings such as Tekumel where everything is well thought out and seemingly unique with only an element of flavor coming from its historical inspiration there is still an element that can be recognized as having an obvious historical counterpart.



Even if creating an entirely unique culture for a game world was possible, would it be desirable? I mean how many players would really be interested in learning it? I struggle to find players interested in anything that is too far from the stock fantasy tropes, much less something wholly different.



So I guess the real question here is, when it comes to borrowing from history what constitutes doing it right and what exactly is doing it wrong?

Historical pastiches in setting design.