I just thought I'd leave this here in case anyone is interested.

The Kickstarter for the English edition of the The Dark Eye RPG has started.

So if you want to know more about the world in which games like Realms of Arkania, Chains of Satinav, Memoria, Drakensang or Blackguards are set this is your chance.

Nice! Thanks for posting this.

Many thanks Yezemin!

This I like. Basically the very first game that I played and that had words "The Dark Eye" on it's cover, was Drakensang: The Dark Eye. Loved it. But it came to the point, where I just could not kill something in some cave and full of frustration, I abandoned the game. But the lore is still interesting me.

So, all in all, great news!

You should see the very first games based on the Dark Eye license, then, the Realms of Arkania series. Those games are legitimately mental in both difficulty and complexity, as if they were purely made for people who were already familiar with the pen & paper system.
I'm pretty sure Drakensang is a walk in the park compared to those.

If someone wants to gift me the real leather version I'd be very grateful ;)

I loved all the PC Dark Eye games I played- Drakensang is one of my very favourite RPGs, and Chains of Satinav one of my favourite point & clicks. Meomoria and Blackguards were pretty good too. I'd love to get into the pen & paper version. Polish edition would be better (it's always a little odd, having the books and rules in english, but playing in polish), but the RPG books market in Poland is basically dead now, so no hope for that.

Still,the reall issue is "do I really need another medieval fantasy RPG, and will I get my friends to play it instead of D&D and Warhammer which they already know and play with ease?" And the unswer is unfortunately "not really".

I do know for a fact, that there actually is a lot of walking IN Drakensang. Which makes the whole matter a bit funny, and I do not want to try Realms of Arkania just yet. No, I am not yet ready for that kind of game.

I actually managed to finish Drakensang despite no prior knowledge of the system (and the fact the character I made was a little crappy), but when I tried Realms of Arkania I felt lost almost immediately :D

I started playing Drakensang for two reasons:
1. It's RPG
2. It looked really beautiful

Later on I still loved those two reasons and the third was that every time I win some combat, I would get this fussy warm feeling inside "I did not die! I did not die!"

I was playing with a thief/rogue-like character. As always, I was all about stealing stuff. And it did not help me in combat. Also, I have still much to learn about the pen and paper game system.

None of my friends play PnP (we're in our fifties and I guess they figure it's for young people - they don't game on the computer either), but I enjoy picking up the rule books for games like this and D&D just to read.

Honestly, I don't think anybody is ever really "ready" for Realms of Arkania. I mean, even navigating towns in those games is quite the task, especially in Blade of Destiny, which gives you an automap that's all but useless.
Pretty interesting games, though, and they do have amusing "cameos" by celebrities like David Bowie or Pierce Brosnan.

As for Drakensang, I have only played a bit the prequel, "Drakensang: The River of Time". I found it pretty entertaining for a while, at least until I was killed by a pack of giant rats. That was when I gave up.

Still need the Drakensang games here. :-P

I'd enjoy that very much too, but usually those books are just way to expensive for me to buy if I'm not going to actually use them. Unfortunately the tabletop RPG market in Poland is pretty much dead, and that also makes the second-hand market crazy expensive- with no new printings the old copies never get cheaper. So I stick to only buying what I know I'll get some mileage out of with my friends.

The whole "tabletop RPG market being dead" thing is really weird, because we're also in the middle of a huge board game boom. It's board games everywhere, with plenty of stores and even pubs devoted to them, and yet RPGs are pretty much non-existant, I don't think I've seen a new book published in like 4 years, maybe more.

I'm surprised it's so dead in Poland. I'd have thought there would be a market there, as there seem to be a good number of fans of CRPGs (Although this is a totally small sample size, and just my observation of a couple gaming boards).

It's not quite that bad over here, but you have to know where to look in order to get peripherals to tabletop RPG games (many of the core books can be found in book chains like Chapters).

Speaking of expensive, I had a lovely collection of old Advanced AD&D rule books stored away on the east coast (along with a whole stack of the old TSR modules such as Tomb of Horrors, The Keep on the Borderlands, the Against the Giants series, and a ton of others) but, alas, they seem to have disappeared. I checked out on-line to see what it would cost to get replacements... heh, that's not going to happen.