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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8244642"><p>This is not well understood by people today. It wasn't the age of google and a lot o f times you were stuck with the books available in your area. If you lived near a major city, for example I am near Boston, you could get to a nice public library. But even something like that means you are commuting an hour there and back just to get the information you need (in most instances I was using my small local library and book store when I wrote papers for school at that time). Also there were not as many translations of things. Right now I can obtain five or six different translations of Pu Songling's Tales from a Chinese Studio, and a number of books describing that genre in great depth. Back in 1991, I am not 100% sure what translations were available but it wouldn't surprise me if the only one was Herbert Giles, which is fine, but it isn't the same as having multiple translations with a wide variety of explanations and commentary available so that you understand what Giles means when he chooses a particular word (like "demon" for example). And like you say, there is google. When I see a lot of people today critique information that was in older RPG books, they often mention how quickly they were able to debunk that info with google (and I think they just assume pre-internet this would have maybe taken longer but still been relatively easy). It wasn't. This is one of the reasons why the three source rule exists: because there was always a very good chance one of your sources, even a reliable one, had an error in it. And that error tended to get repeated in books working off that as a source. We are in an age of instant correction.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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