Terminology

[Blue Ghost]

I'm curious how much of the lexicon is Traveller specific, and how much is generic if a person wanted to use it in a Cepheus product.

Specifically is "grav" a Traveller term? I've never heard used outside the game--usually antigravity or antigrav is favored.

Thanks for any replies.

 

[infojunky]

I'm curious how much of the lexicon is Traveller specific, and how much is generic if a person wanted to use it in a Cepheus product.

Specifically is "grav" a Traveller term? I've never heard used outside the game--usually antigravity or antigrav is favored.

I have seen Grav-Car Etc. etc... in other game books, most recently in Gurps non-Traveller books specifically.

 

[nobby-w]

I'm curious how much of the lexicon is Traveller specific, and how much is generic if a person wanted to use it in a Cepheus product.

Specifically is "grav" a Traveller term? I've never heard used outside the game--usually antigravity or antigrav is favored.

Thanks for any replies.

I've seen Air/Raft, Vacc Suit, Cleon, Sword Worlds, Low Berths and plenty of other Traveller-isms in their source materials. Quite a lot of the tropes in Traveller are derived from other sources. Take a look at Space Viking, Foundation, Dumarest Saga and the Dominic Flandry stories and you'll see a lot of familiar concepts and terminology.

However, in RPG circles a lot of these terms are associated with Traveller, to the extent that they would look a bit awkward if you tried to re-use them in another setting. You would get much the same effect if, for example, you tried to re-use the force and light sabres in a non Star Wars 'verse. Having done a few homebrew sci-fi systems in my day, I can say that it's not a trivial undertaking to make a sci-fi game that uses a markedly different lexicon to Traveller, Star Wars, Star Trek and Aliens. Similar phenomena exist in fantasy circles. Many, many folks produce games that obviously started out as an improved version of D&D - there's even a term ('Heartbreaker') to describe such systems.

IANAL, but legally you're pretty much free to use the terms as you can't copyright a word (not to be confused with trade marks where you sort of can). After all, GDW lifted plenty of terminology from other works and terminology (e.g. Blaster) gets re-cycled across sci-fi all the time.