Trivia / The Witcher: Game of Imagination

• Colbert Bump:
  • This game turned witcher fandom into tabletop players, leading to general spike of popularity of the hobby itself.
  • In turn, the anticipation for and release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt reignited popularity of the game, making it a cross-generational thing. It also causes the prices of the used books to cross three- and even four-digits for the whole sets of expansions.
• Fan Translation: At least three were started...
  • The one championed by /tg/ managed to get all the rules from the basic sourcebook translated, but without all the fluff and - most importantly - chapter with monsters. It's still the closest thing to full translation, as the game is fully playable even in such incomplete state. It also comes with a clear, openly stated in the translator notes agenda of changing a bunch of minor rules, both for consistency and "fixing" problems the game has as written in Polish.
• Genre Popularizer: Downplayed. Thanks to being a game written in Polish and based on Polish media property that everyone already knew, Game of Imagination managed to greatly help popularity of the tabletop RPG, as it brought huge number of new people to it and most of them stayed to play other titles.
• Newbie Boom:
  • Originally, Game of Imagination was responsible for massive influx of new players into the Polish RPG scene as a whole. As usually in such situations, this didn't create the smartest reaction from pre-existing fandom. The game was even derogatively called "Hammer for morons"^note Wahrammer Fantasy used to be Serious Business in Poland and any game that didn't follow 1e design or its level of obtuseness was considered bad by default and looked down for bringing in "stupid noobs".
  • The video games, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in particular, made new people flock to the system in large numbers, with also a clear generational gap with the original fandom. This time around, it went with more endearing terms, creating few-year long boom for any "old grogs" to dust their own books and run for new people.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Paper editions of "White Wolf" are becoming more and more rare, since they were printed in relatively small numbers and in fragile magazine format. PDF bootleg version? They are all copies of one and the same scan. Most of the articles published in the defunct "Sword and Sorcery" magazine don't even have scans, so it's all up to people who own certain issues to keep circulating them.
  • Generally speaking, good luck trying to buy the game at all at this point. Used copies reach some astronomical prices^note Roughtly four-five times the original price tag, and that's when you are lucky - for that money, you can buy any given tabletop RPG and some supplement materials to it. The prices reach the point where the pocket edition of the game, a tiny booklet containing only bare bones of rules, costs more than the full game upon release and are very rare to come by. Expansions, as noted above, disappeared from the market entirely. It doesn't help matters that the game, and particularly whole sets, became a collector item soon after Wild Hunt's premiere.
• No Export for You: There in no other language version than Polish and MAG Publishing House left the tabletop RPG market in 2004, so chances are really low for any export.

---