GT is GURPS using an alternative Traveller setting. That says absolutely nothing about its quality and in fact I've bought a few of the sourcebooks to use as references, since I consider the information they contain about worlds, history and such to be more or less "semi-canon", since they were put together under the eye of Loren. That said, if anything in them contradicts TNE (and by extension MT or CT) or even CoE (also "semi-canon"...a whole discussion to have later, but everything in there was developed from John Harshman's original work as well as MT), I put it aside in favor of what was written prior to GT.
With all due respect to Marc or any 'Traveller canon fanatics' (and this is coming from one), to declare anything published for Traveller by a license holder between 1998 and 2013 to be some sort of heresy is laughable, not as laughable as the editing on T4, but I digress. It's particularly rich in light of the fact MonTrav derives in large part from an early T5 draft and Marc was consulted in the writing of it. If a bunch of middle-aged guys and gals happened to throw down coin last year for a Kickstarter campaign and get T5 published, cool (super cool actually, it says something good about the popularity of the game). But that fact alone doesn't invalidate anything MonTrav, per se. Now if Marc wants to hire someone to write a "history of the Fourth Imperium" for his company that contradicts everything done for MonTrav, or for that matter, wants to re-write Earth's history post-war from "1117 to 1248" and ignore everything that Martin and I did
(or DGP did), then fine, as the copyright holder he's entitled, but don't expect that to fly too well with this bunch.
Really, the hierarchy of canon is as follows: 1) that which is written by the copyright holder, 2) that which is written by an official license holder, 3) that which is written with a letter of permission from the copyright holder (fanzine stuff), all other generally accepted writings within the community. But even then, if the Traveller community as a whole doesn't like it, it doesn't matter what people publish, it'll end up in the discount bin like T4 and will be cheerfully ignored until someone comes out with a new version.
The problem with having any sort of "holy war" over all this would be that eventually we ended up urinating all over each other, declaring a pox on everyone's house and doing our thing, having changed no one's mind. Traveller fans of all types are a balkanized group that love the game, but can't agree on how to play it or even much beyond what appears in the little black books and their GDW supplements.
With all due respect to Marc or any 'Traveller canon fanatics' (and this is coming from one), to declare anything published for Traveller by a license holder between 1998 and 2013 to be some sort of heresy is laughable, not as laughable as the editing on T4, but I digress. It's particularly rich in light of the fact MonTrav derives in large part from an early T5 draft and Marc was consulted in the writing of it. If a bunch of middle-aged guys and gals happened to throw down coin last year for a Kickstarter campaign and get T5 published, cool (super cool actually, it says something good about the popularity of the game). But that fact alone doesn't invalidate anything MonTrav, per se. Now if Marc wants to hire someone to write a "history of the Fourth Imperium" for his company that contradicts everything done for MonTrav, or for that matter, wants to re-write Earth's history post-war from "1117 to 1248" and ignore everything that Martin and I did
(or DGP did), then fine, as the copyright holder he's entitled, but don't expect that to fly too well with this bunch.
Really, the hierarchy of canon is as follows: 1) that which is written by the copyright holder, 2) that which is written by an official license holder, 3) that which is written with a letter of permission from the copyright holder (fanzine stuff), all other generally accepted writings within the community. But even then, if the Traveller community as a whole doesn't like it, it doesn't matter what people publish, it'll end up in the discount bin like T4 and will be cheerfully ignored until someone comes out with a new version.
The problem with having any sort of "holy war" over all this would be that eventually we ended up urinating all over each other, declaring a pox on everyone's house and doing our thing, having changed no one's mind. Traveller fans of all types are a balkanized group that love the game, but can't agree on how to play it or even much beyond what appears in the little black books and their GDW supplements.