Consider:

Conclusion: an adventuring party consisting of a Victorian gentleman thief, an Old West gunslinger, a disgraced former samurai, and an elderly French pirate is actually 100% historically plausible.

It really just comes down to whether a given individual or group is looking for reasons to include, or reasons to exclude. Hypothetical groups like these can go a lot further than this, too.

As much as I absolutely adore this, you’d probably have to come up with a fairly good reason for them to all meet up together in the first place. I mean, MLK and Anne Frank were born in the same year, but they lived on different continents and had no opportunity to meet. I’m not saying these cross cultural interactions are impossible, but choosing a certain region with an era isn’t necessarily exclusionary. It just doesn’t occur to people (or rather most writers in general) how well these eras matched up or how to connect these extremely varied backgrounds.

just make it a fighting game and ur good tho

I didn’t pick those roles at random, mind. All four of them are outlaws of some description, and thus have incentive to travel outside their native range - and in particular, all four of them would have any number of plausible excuses for ending up in San Francisco during the late 1860s or early 1870s. Once you’ve got them within shouting distance of each other, getting them in the same adventuring party is a simple matter of Plot.

I feel dumb for not picking up on that. :B I’d definitely be curious to know just what kind of hijinx they’d be getting themselves into (I can already imagine an Ocean’s Eleven-esque heist).

Out of curiosity, why San Fran? I’m a west coaster myself, but I usually picture New York when it comes to historical fiction.

1. San Fransisco in the early 1870s is both very prosperous and a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

2. It’s more plausible for a vaquero and a ronin samurai to meet there by chance - New York is on the wrong coast entirely for that.

3. Emperor Norton.

Ok so this isn't sifi but this blog is more likely to reach writers and I want to read this as a story