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In the game series, while Jen puts Uma through the Trial of the Grasses​, Vesemir tells us that it's the first Trial for 50 years. Also all the Witchers are not very happy about all of this mess.

So why are there no Trials anymore? Is it so rare? Don't they see themselves as a necessary evil (monster hunting)? Is it connected with the reason why the different schools vanish?

I know the games are not canon, but the game only cover about 10 years, so it seems this "problem" already existed before.

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There were no more Trials of the Grasses because there's no one to perform/endure the Trial any more:

  1. The general public considered witchers monsters, and did not want their children to become witchers, which considerably lowered the number of candidates available for the schools to perform the Trial on.

  2. Only 3 in 10 survived the Trial, severely reducing the number of of people who became witchers, who would collect more children for their schools and/or support the schools.

  3. The recipe was kept secret, and was lost when Kaer Morhen was attacked. Since the games are not canon, they were able to get the recipe through Yennifer.

With few people joining, even fewer surviving to the end, the dangerous job, society making life generally difficult, and the secrecy around the recipe, there were few people to support the schools and/or knew how to perform the Trial completely. This made it easy to lose the recipe, which it was, when Kaer Morhen was attacked.

If I remember correctly from The Witcher 3, Ciri was the last person to train as a witcher at Kaer Morhen, but never went through the Trials.

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    In a side quests (can't remember which) where you need to bring a child to it's aunt. She asks to take the child with you. In times of war and in an medieval society, there should be plenty of people willing to give theirs children away before starving – Mruf Apr 3 '19 at 7:15
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    @Mruf The side-quest you're referring to is "Where The Cat And Wolf Play". – Mike Scott Apr 3 '19 at 9:32
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    @Mruf One exception wasn't about to rebuild the school of the wolf. Besides, one of the subplots of the games is the slow decline of the witcher profession through societal fear/hatred, so although people were probably willing to give up their children to not starve, they would rather starve than allow for their children to turn into what they saw as monsters. – calccrypto Apr 3 '19 at 13:06
  • Piggybacking on what @Mruf said, isn't Lambert someone who was put through training because of being given up? I don't remember the whole story but Lambert at one point tells Geralt about how he ended up becoming a witcher. – Muhammad Usman Apr 3 '19 at 16:53
  • And also witchers could invoke the law of surprise and thus receive a child as reward which will go into training to become a witcher. – RigaCrypto Jan 14 '20 at 7:20

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