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Re: (TFT) fiction ?

I always wondered about the name "orc" myself. I asked some higher ups at TSR once about their usage of that name and character type and they told me that they'd prefer not to talk about it to loudly. I think they were flying under the radar screen with the Tolkien estate and trying not to draw too much attention to it. So how many game companies could they close down for the use of this term? Of course now it seems that the term orc has been added into our language, at least pop culture language. 

--David O. Miller


Game to book copyright issues:
I'm not sure the issue has ever been litigated, but I'm just about sure that if you file off the serial numbers (get rid of really distinctive terms like "Armor Class" or "Prootwaddle" or "Hobbit"), then you could flog a book. There's another theory that might work too, that the book or screenplay is a "derivative work". BTW, I don't know how it came out in the end, but 30 years ago TSR got in trouble over the term HOBBIT, but they located Halfling 
in the original Nordic myths Tolkien drew from, so they switched all
references in the books to "Halflings". Of course years later after D&D got bigger and richer than the Tolkien estate, they may have just licensed the 
term back!
Finally, I suspect that in market terms, it would LOWER a book's value if it had references that were too clearly geared towards a particular game system: most potential readers wouldn't be players and would find the references lame. So, the typical publisher would ask for, and the typical author would write, 
"generic" fantasy novels... which is pretty much a description of the
publishing world right now anyhow.

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