We were planning on running a 3.5 campaign with an oriental-themed party: Samurai, Ninja, Shugenja, Wu Jen etc. There are all sorts of story reasons in place to make sense of this: a quasi-oriental dwarven empire (with a gnome underclass) for the characters to come from, giving them variously reasons for loyalty to a cause, reasons to resent NPCs or each other, etc.

But since making this plan, we've started playing some Pathfinder and so far we like it. It cleans up some of the cruft and gives each class more customisation options, especially with the Advanced book out now. So when planning a major new campaign that's likely to last a whole year in real time, that's probably the system we'd choose.

Can you suggest class features, traits etc to produce characters matching oriental archetypes? I don't necessarily mean duplicating the 3.5 Ninja class so much as the idea of a ninja in popular fiction (and yes, anime, but avoiding the obvious) - as well as archetypes that haven't specifically been named in D&D before.