I will admit this is a sample size of one, but the Updown Girl does imply that you can get characters of unexpected ethnic backgrounds.
Also, Racism doesn't seem so ingrained in Mythic Europe. By that I mean people seem more accepting of your atypical neighbours than of the people in the next valley over. At least the colour of your skin seems far less important than your religious practices.
Though I may be reading too much into the grave-goods situation.
Though expecting someone from China to show up is probably stretching things too far. But a Skraeling from Vinland?
There are specific flaws for "outsiders" both minor and major. So there is room for one to playa Baltic/Sami Pagan, an Abyssinan traveller (the emissary of Prester John!) or even a Mongol scout. Vikings went far enough south to meet the Blue People, so mixed race vikings would already be realistic.
Playing a Skraeling (correctly) would be tough becaise we don't know so much about them.
Realistically racism was alive and well back to the Roman era- they had traits they believed were specific to Germans, to Celts, and so on. Germans could be identified by their bright red hair and so forth as well. Skin color wasn't so much a thing because most "races" all had white skin. On top of that the collapse of the Roman Empire saw some mass migration of tribal groups which would have involved a lot of intermixing, so the early middle ages were likely a low point for the prevalence of racial stereotypes.
I have a Norwegian coworker. She said when thinking about the ethnicity of Norway, about 3/4 of the population is stereotypical in appearance - tall, fair, blue eyes, light hair. Then she said, you have to take into account the Vikings were pretty serious slavers over a period of centuries. She said the last 1/4 will still have been Norwegian for centuries (church records and the like) but not look "norwegian" at all and can have all sorts of features. (Discounting modern immigration, of course.)
Race as we know it today is an invention that is much later in time than the medieval era. I know it sounds dumb, because we are so used to thinking about race in modern terms, but there is not really any evidence that ancient people applied a similar scheme to divide people.
There were certainly concepts of "strangers" but modern racist ideas about race, and in particular racial categories based on skin color did not exist back then, nor the idea that a persons "value" is any way related to modern concepts of race.
Just last week i read that there is mitochondrial evidence that at contemporary icelanders have at least one native american woman among their ancestors. Meaning that the ancestors of modern icelanders had close enough contact with native americans to produce a line of female children that continues to this day.
I remember a Morse episode (or possibly Lewis, no probably Endeavour) displaying an Oxford debate with a student making the case that the Romans had Nubian guards on Hadrian's wall. If this is true, it easily accounts for lines of sub-Saharan DNA 500 or 1000 years later, without justifying anybody actually looking African.
Or more concisely put, a distant ancestor does not say anything about looks.
The Uptown girl makes a case for unexpected genetics, not unexpected ethnicity.
But the Vikings travelled and met the bluemen (they did not have a word for black IIUC) and the native Americans. It is not a stretch to imagine someone travelling back with them. In the 13C there was a Catholic bishop on Greenland; we know very little about the Norse society there, but it would be strange if they did not have contact with the Inuit, and they certainly traded with Europe.
To the best of my knowledge, it is true.
The Romans made a point of posting soldiers to corners of the empire that were far from where they came from, at least in part (if not entirely) to limit collaborations with the locals. It is much less likely that the local garrison will join the locals in a rebellion against Rome if they can barely speak the language and have their families hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
I don't know about nubians on Hadrian's Wall specifically, but documents exist that indicate the presence of (IIRC) egyptians in a garrison at or near said wall. There are also some archeological evidence, though there could be other explanations for those.
Ceaser's reports from the front described the people he fought in terms that echo i racist stereotypes today, except of course that he was applying them to the wrong peoples (northern more primitive civilizations instead of Africans). and certainly Roman citizenship was something that was only supposed to be obtained through heredity (though later military service also qualified) to the point of having very strict marriage rules for women citizens.
Also worth noting that many Nordic tribes immigrated to Europe from northern Asia, and may well have shared an ancestry with tribes which crossed the land bridge into North America.
Blue skin or almond eyes are certainly worth a Reputation. The less rare blond hair / blue eye might too. But I'm pretty sure the girl from 2 towns over is trying to steal everyone's husband.
IOW, I see this as a nice excuse to take a Virtue/Flaw or make a package deal.
Maybe, maybe not. There are Chinese records of embassies from the Byzantines in 1081 and 1091, and then there are several known cases of Europeans going to China in the latter 1200s (Marco Polo being the most famous). If some Europeans can reach China, some Chinese can presumably reach Europe.
I had once wondered if I should have an odd note in my Saga's history that several of the Founders might have encountered a Taoist sorcerer from Tang-era China.
Hmm? That post doesn't say that. It says the "Mythic Hind" occasionally mentioned in tCatC is a Faerie place, not that there isn't a "real" Mythic India east of Persia.
And, well. There's a very obvious reason for Atlas Games and its Line Editor to prohibit its writers from presenting any canon about a "real" Mythic India, which is that trying to reconcile Hinduism with the Four Realm model is an obvious cultural-political-religious minefield, and nobody's offering them remotely enough money to make up for the potential grief.