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I have bought today the first two books of The Witcher saga by Andrzej Sapkowski. Can anyone tell me if they contain "spoilers" about The Witcher 2 (I'm playing it now, so I want to know if waiting before starting to read the first book)?
Post edited January 13, 2012 by WrathOfTheAngels
the game takes place after the events in the books, so I think you're safe.
Go ahead, read them! If anything, you will understand the story better.
No, games don't contain any game spoilers at all.
You will get to know a some game characters better and maybe will even enjoy interacting with them more.
They occur before the games so the content of the books will only help to increase your understanding of the lead character and also the worldset inwhich he's present. It also goes into more detail about certain key story points in his past as well. Generally they help flesh out the content of the game a lot and are well worth reading (plus all the additional readers means they might get round to translating the rest of the stories)
What do you mean by 'the first two books'? There's seven altogether, two containing short stories and five describing a story called The Witcher Saga. If you've got two out of five then you're got going to be too happy about not knowing the rest ;)

Anyway, the books are great and will make you know the universe and characters better. You'll also learn about very important person, one of the main characters, which was not present in the game.

The first game is set five years after what happened in the saga and mr Sapkowski doesn't even consider it as a proper continuation so you don't have to worry about any spoilers. Apart from the universe and the characters obviously books and games have got nothing in common.
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nagytow: What do you mean by 'the first two books'? There's seven altogether, two containing short stories and five describing a story called The Witcher Saga. If you've got two out of five then you're got going to be too happy about not knowing the rest ;)
There are only two books so far in the English market (and, I expect, the general European one since generally it's the English market that drives the rest), those books are The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, which are namely the first short story book and the first of the five novels. There's talk about Times of Contempt being released soon, but nothing seems to be set in stone. The rest of the books seem to only be available in polish, sadly.

I personally read The Last Wish and, though generally a nice book, I found the framing story got in the way more often than it did anything from the novel and some of the stories were a little too stuffed with unneeded details. Some of the other stories are amazing though, so it's not like it's a bad book. I wrote a review on it for my site if anyone's else is interested:

http://www.tizzysart.com/en/book-review/the-last-wish/

Also, this won't spoil the game at all ;)
Ok, thank you to you all :)
However the original titles of the two books that I have are "Ostatnie życzenie" and "Miecz przeznaczenia".
Now is time to planning how to conciliate work, videogaming, reading and girlfriend... Uhmmmm... Also sleeping should be a thing that I should do
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nagytow: What do you mean by 'the first two books'? There's seven altogether, two containing short stories and five describing a story called The Witcher Saga. If you've got two out of five then you're got going to be too happy about not knowing the rest ;)
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Tizzysawr: There are only two books so far in the English market (and, I expect, the general European one since generally it's the English market that drives the rest), those books are The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, which are namely the first short story book and the first of the five novels. There's talk about Times of Contempt being released soon, but nothing seems to be set in stone. The rest of the books seem to only be available in polish, sadly.
They're availible in Czech, too! ... Not ... That it changes much for the rest of the world.
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WrathOfTheAngels: Ok, thank you to you all :)
However the original titles of the two books that I have are "Ostatnie życzenie" and "Miecz przeznaczenia".
Now is time to planning how to conciliate work, videogaming, reading and girlfriend... Uhmmmm... Also sleeping should be a thing that I should do
For those of us who don't read Polish, those titles are "The Last Wish" and "Sword of Destiny".

They have a lot of background on major characters of both games. You don't need to worry about spoilers.
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Tizzysawr: There are only two books so far in the English market (and, I expect, the general European one since generally it's the English market that drives the rest), those books are The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, which are namely the first short story book and the first of the five novels. There's talk about Times of Contempt being released soon, but nothing seems to be set in stone. The rest of the books seem to only be available in polish, sadly.
The Witcher Wiki:
"The stories and novels have been translated into Bulgarian, Czech, Serbian, Swedish, Russian, German, Italian, Lithuanian, French, Portugese, Spanish and partly Finnish."

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Witcher_series
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WrathOfTheAngels: I have bought today the first two books of The Witcher saga by Andrzej Sapkowski. Can anyone tell me if they contain "spoilers" about The Witcher 2 (I'm playing it now, so I want to know if waiting before starting to read the first book)?
No, the game contain spoilers about books! Be Careful!
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cjrgreen: For those of us who don't read Polish, those titles are "The Last Wish" and "Sword of Destiny".
Thank you for the clarification. I wasn't able to fins the English titles...
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Tizzysawr: There are only two books so far in the English market (and, I expect, the general European one since generally it's the English market that drives the rest), those books are The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, which are namely the first short story book and the first of the five novels. There's talk about Times of Contempt being released soon, but nothing seems to be set in stone. The rest of the books seem to only be available in polish, sadly.
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nocny: The Witcher Wiki:
"The stories and novels have been translated into Bulgarian, Czech, Serbian, Swedish, Russian, German, Italian, Lithuanian, French, Portugese, Spanish and partly Finnish."

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Witcher_series
So, in general, every major European language except English :P.
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nocny: "The stories and novels have been translated into [...] Swedish
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Rondel: So, in general, every major European language except English :P.
Now this is annoying, I much prefer to read in English despite Swedish being my native tongue.