There was. It really is almost mysterious what happened to it. About a decade ago it was niche, but quite strong, with polish editions of many popular systems systems, and also quite a few of our own like Wolsung, which was sort of a Arcanum type setting, The Witcher pen & paper game (and you'd think that would be super popular now, right? bu no, it's almost utterly forgotten), and a few more but I can't remember the names now. You could get pretty much every book for D&D 3.5 and Warhammer FRP in polish. And then we got the core rule books for D&D 4th... and that was it. No new books, no new systems. The books started to disappear from bookstores, and gaming stores that survive shifted entirely from RPGs to board games and card games. It looks like some really crazy generational gap, with mine being the last to play tabletop RPGs. The younger people are all about board games, which suddenly became "cool", and RPGs are only something that exists on computer screens. But it's still strange how it all disappeared in literally a couple of years.

I had no idea the situation was that bad in Poland, although I have to admit that I never had much contact with Polish rpgs. I didn't even know there was a Witcher rpg. The only Polish games I knew about were Wolsung because I know the people doing the German translation and Neuroshima. And the latter only because of the board games set in the same universe.

This is very surprising. I guess things go in cycles though. I remember when D&D almost disappeared over here and then made a comeback. Although not sure where it stands now, I have seen the new edition core rule books in the local big box bookstore.

Your point about board games is valid here as well though, as the local game store has about 90% of its shelf space dedicated to various board games (and many of them have several different 'flavors'). There's only a very small RPG section. But at least it's there. I picked up the Numenera rule book there on a whim.

There's also a couple comic book stores sround my area that carry some of the RPG game system rule books.Talking to these small guys though, they say it's pretty tough to justify a larger stock, since much of the stuff they carry can be bought cheaper on Amazon. Common story with printed material. When I managed one of the local small book stores we had the same issue. We just couldn't discount books like Amazon can, since we just didn't deal in the volume so didn't get the deep publisher discounts on our orders.

It never got much traction, I think largely because it was released roughly at the same time as the much maligned movie, and marketed with it. But it wasn't bad from what I remember (only reading, I nver head a chance to play it) and I think it really speaks volumes about the death of the tabletop RPG market around here that there was no new revised edition of that system to coincide with The Witcher's recent huge succes in almost every other medium.

Haha, to make that sentence correct you have to scratch the 'as if'. :-)

Back in the day most RPGs (at least those that licensed P&P rulesets) were made for the P&P audience.
It's true that the games were very difficult and unvorgiving but so were most games from that time. I have played and finished all three of them back then.