Before diving into the crossover questions, let's
take a moment to establish the assumptions Exalted
vs World of Darkness holds for how the Hungry Dead
come to exist in the first place. Or, in plain language:
Why do the Hungry Dead only appear in Asia?
The official answer preferred by most traditional
courts of the Quincunx has to do with the Middle
Kingdom being the center of the cosmos, and a place
of clearer spiritual refinement than the barbaric West;
or else holds that those outside of the borders of Asia
lack the spiritual fortitude to claw their way free of
Hell; or some similar bit of racist self-aggrandizement.
All of these theories are flatly incorrect. The minds
and souls of the people of Asia differ in no way from
those of everyone else in the world, nor are they in any
way changed or ensorcelled by dwelling where they do.
So: Why do the Hungry Dead only appear there?
The real answer is this: They don't. The Hungry Dead
are in no way exclusive to Asia. The phenomenon of
damned souls escaping from realms of torment and
crawling back into their corpses is global. It happens
everywhere, and has happened everywhere since well
before the advent of written history.
When newly reborn, the Hungry Dead are almost
uniformly feral, flesh-devouring cadavers. Monster-
hunters, panicked mortal mobs, and other monsters
have destroyed these unruly corpses since time
out of mind. Kindred are especially likely to run into
them and to dispatch them as a threat to their Masquerade,
either mistaking them for childer of Caine
that have lost their battle with the Beast, botched attempts
at the Embrace, or simply shrugging them off
as one more oddity in a nightscape full of them. Those
few Hungry Dead that battle their way back to sapience
are left without a society to welcome them, a framework
for survival, or any clear idea of what they are.
They rarely last long.
The Hungry Dead hold court over the Asian nights
because those are the lands where a critical mass of their
kind were able to wrest themselves out of feral mindlessness,
develop systems of behavior to stave off a return
to that miserable state, and construct a society that captures
and civilizes newly-risen flesh-eaters until they can
comport themselves as vampires rather than shambling
zombies. Most crucially, they established their earliest
philosophies and courts without competitive pressure
from the Kindred, a very similar sort of monster occupying
the same predatory niche, who were still branching
outwards from the Fertile Crescent during this period.
It is largely the Kindred who have prevented the
development of societies of the Hungry Dead west of
the Indian subcontinent, prevailing and predominating
through their advantages of faster and more efficient
reproduction, rebirth into an established relationship
with a potential tutor on hand, and less complicated,
more easily-developed Disciplines.
As the Hungry Dead spread out from their traditional
ranges in search of new hunting grounds and
places of power, they encounter feral corpses where
they think to look for them: in Chinatowns, Little Indias,
and other ethnic enclaves around the world. They
call these wayward monsters kànbujiàn: lost brethren
arising far outside the borders of the Middle Kingdom.
In truth, they would find such creatures wherever they
took the time to look for them, but this knowledge has
not yet become widespread among even the learned
scholars of the Demon People.
