Kosultacje społecznościowe

Jak wszyscy zapewne pamiętają, wszyscy chętnie dowiedzielibyśmy się, jak wygląda światek RPG wśród różnych innych dziwnych krajów, zwłaszcza tych nie bazujących na języku angielskim.

Dzięki różnym zainteresowanym osobom mogliśmy zorientować się jak to wygląda w Skandynawii, na Węgrzech, w Rosji i Bułgarii. Chyba tyle.

Natomiast ja, jeszcze w 2011, zagadałem z jednym z adminów na geeku, żeby zorganizować inicjatywę, w której użytownicy - szczególnie spoza USA - mogliby zaprezentować w artykule jak wygląda światek RPG u nich w kraju. Z góry na dół, wszystkie ciekawe informacje. Po cichu liczyłem na to, że zarejestrowanie tam użytownicy podzielą się doświadczeniami i otrzymamy relacje z np. Holandii, RPA czy Hiszpanii.

Admin uznał atrakcyjność koncepcji. Postawił natomiast warunek - mam napisać taki tekst o Polsce. Byłby to jednocześnie początek serii (co miesięcznej zapewne) i instrukcja jak taki tekst miałby wyglądać.

Minęło trochę czasu i w końcu się nawet zmusiłem do napaskudzenia takiego artykułu. Poniżej zamieszczam wersję - powiedzmy - beta końcowego tekstu.
Wszystkie uwagi mile widziane. Zwracam uwagę, że nie robiłem korekty na poziomie językowym - chodzi mi głównie o korektę merytoryczną. A także uwagi co wywalić, co dodać, co usunąć. Na pewno są wśród was większe dinozaury fandomu niż ja, większe wygi konwentowe itd.

Ewentualny przegląd-lista polskich RPGów, polskich konwnentów może być naturalnie w przyszłości dodana.

"In Poland, RPG appeared in early 1990s or - to be precise - in the year 1993 with the first issue of the Magia i Miecz (Magic & Sword) magazine. Inside the reader could find the first part of the first version of the first polish RPG -Kryształy Czasu (Crystals of Time). The game left lasting mark on the polish RPG scene. In itself it was - in general and some fundamental mechanic concepts - based on the Ad&d. There were races. There were classes. There were attributes. There were saving throws. There was s.t. like armor class. There were no spell slots, though and a small wealth of original ideas. The game was quite different on the micro level, which nicely balanced macro level similarities. However - for many reasons - the game never became a symbol of role playing in Poland. Partially because the publisher was quite hesitant to publish it in book format and when it finally arrived it was too late.

This honor goes to Warhammer. It was published by Mag - publisher of Magia i Miecz magazine - at the end of 1994. The game stormed polish scene becoming huge success - in fact the sheer amount of rulebooks sold is still unchallenged by any other game. While I can’t provide specific number, I believe there were between 20 and 25 thousand copies printed of the core rulebook. Soon playing RPG and playing Warhammer became nearly synonyms. The great popularity of Warhammer was the main reason why Ad&d never became popular when it was finally printed.

The Magia i Miecz magazine and Warhammer game were two pillars of polish roleplaying. Especially the influence of the magazine was indisputable. After publishing Warhammer there was a feeling of waiting for the first published polish game. Despite the fact that Mag had already reasonably popular product (Kryształy Czasu) and that it was already established publisher, it came as surprise that the first polish RPG was “Zły Cień. Kruki Urojenia” (Evil Shadow. Phantasmal Crows) published indenpendently by the author. It was followed by “Aphalon - Świat Księżycowego Ostrza” (Aphalon - World of the Moon Blade). Both games were published as big, thick rulebooks and failed to draw attention of polish roleplayers for a significant period of time, probably due to bad reviews in Magia i Miecz. The same year Mag published Oko Yrrhedesa (Eye of Yrrhedes) - a small RPG written by rising star among polish speculative fiction writers, creator of Witcher, Andrzej Sapkowski. The game was well received, perceived as an introductory game into world of roleplaying. It was - again - generic fantasy RPG that included two starting adventures - one of which was classic dungeon crawl scenario called “Oko Yrrhedesa”. Finally, in 1995, in Poznań, was organised first polish convention of fans of Speculative Fiction called Polcon. The convention still lives on being important event for polish roleplayers and even more so for writers and fans of fiction. Following its example, many conventions were organised in Poland.

In the following years the scene of polish roleplayers steadily evolved and grew. It was feeded by a number of games, the most important of them where probably: Call of Cthulhu, edition 5.1.1 (1995), Werewolf: the Apocalypse (1996), Cyberpunk 2020 (1997), Dzikie Pola (1997), Vampire: the Masquerade (??), Earthdawn (1998), Mage: the Ascension (1999), Deadlands (2000) and Legend of the Five Rings (2000). While these games are not a complete list of published RPGs in Poland before 2000, they were definitely the most significant.

It is worth to note that around year 2000 Mag - until know uncontested leader among polish RPG publishers - started to have some problems. First - their Magia i Miecz not only finally gained competition which in many aspects surpassed it - a Portal magazine - but also roleplayers started to adopt internet as their main source of information, adventure ideas, reviews etc. In the effect, the magazine started to decline. Second - the polish RPG market is rather small - not quite small enough to make the idea of publishing RPGs in Poland outright stupid, but small enough to be tricky. The goal to sell anything in comparable amount to first edition of Warhammer turned out to be unachievable dream. As a result - most publishers of roleplaying games gradually turned into relatively successful novel publishing companies or boardgame publishers or companies that publish a lot of different things. Unless they went out of business entirely.

In the following years there were three notable revitilizations of polish RPG scene related to publishing of Neuroshima RPG (2003), polish edition of D&D3 (2002) and Warhammer2 (2005). All three games had quite an impact on polish scene and were followed by significant numer of sourcebooks. Neuroshima created a world of its own if its own and increased popularity of post apocalypse genre among RPG fans tremendously. As a result the are conventions dedicated solely to the genre (Rafineria, Tornado). On the other hand D&D was - for a time - as popular in Poland as anywhere in the world. But the popularity faded and by 4th edition the interest faded almost completely. Warhammer - on the other hand - could rely on incredible sentiment to the first edition and in fact second edition was for few years in hands of many, if not all, gamers.
Currently the scene is neither weak, nor strong. Among publishers there is only one strictly RPG one - Piotr Koryś’ (well, his wife’s really) GRAmel - which publishes polish edition of Savage Worlds. Cautious statistics indicate that SWEX may be the most commonly played RPG in Poland and probably the most popular game with still active publisher. Or at least the SWEX players are the most visible one. The oldest still active RPG publisher is Trzewiczek’s Portal. It has three main RPG products: Neuroshima, translated Indie RPGs and game master’s aids. But Portal is not only RPG publisher as it is at least as well known for it’s board games (Neuroshima Hex, Stronhold), Card Games (51state, New Era, Zombiaki) and recently - skirmish wargame Neuroshima Tactics. The third company active on the market is Kuźnia Gier - publisher of very popular, steampunkish Wolsung. The fourth - and sadly last - rpg publisher is Galmadrin. However this is young company and already greatly behind schedule. Hopefully it is not dead, yet.

In terms of popularity it is really hard to say anything solid. The most popular games are probably Savage Worlds, Wolsung, Neuroshima, Warhammer (2 edition being the most popular version and 1 being still ahead of 3rd), D&D (3-3.5) and maybe Call of Cthulhu.
Moderately popular games include Legend of the five rings (the last published edition was first!), various old World of Darkness RPGs, Monastyr and - probably - some new World of Darkness games. Possibly some indie games published by Portal (most notably Cold City, InSpectres and Blood &Honor) should also fall into this category.
The games which are actively played by only a minority of players are probably Earthdawn, Fading Suns and possibly Cyberpunk 2020, 7th Sea and Klanarchia.

To explain myself - I have based this on the input of 43 people I asked about their gaming activity in 2011. However I was aware that this is very small number of people compared to the number of roleplayers plus I was aware that unproportionally big part of this group is willing to play in games written in english, therefore I sort of adopted the results. Blame me.

Finally - conventions. Of all parts of RPG scene I believe the conventions’ part is in the best condition. Polcon is as healthy as ever, switching cities year by year. Pyrkon breaks attendance record year by year. Warsaw’s Avangarda not only challenges visitors with interesting program but also spawned sidekick convention ZjaVa dedicated nearly solely to playing. Several other conventions also offer interesting possibilities to spent time - most notably Wroclaw’s Inne Sfery which is in fact more of a festival than standard convention. To provide some ideas of how big polish conventions are: Pyrkon 2011 was visited by 3660 and was - by far - the biggest polish convention, ever. The biggest Avangarda - held in 2010 - had under 1500 visitors and last Polcon - 2650.
Lastly - it is worth to mention two important elements of polish RPG community. Two awards.

First - Puchar Mistrza Mistrzów (Masters Master Cup) - annual competition between game masters held on one of the conventions and judged by a jury of experienced roleplayers. The competition is relatively prestigious and with a bit of history as the first competition was organized in 1998. The most succesful game master in history of this competition is Wojciech Rzadek - he won it three times and thus was awarded with permanent trophy.

Second is Quentin - annual award for the best, original scenario adventure. It is one year younger than Puchar Mistrza Mistrzów. Each scenario sent is obviously read and the winner is announced on one of the conventions. All scenarios are later available to read and download. It is probably worth to note that one of the scenarios which ended up as finalist of Quentin competition were later transformed into official boxed set adventure for Neuroshima."