d(sqrt(-1))

Jack Vance fan, perchance?

Doesn't look like Tekumel to me - the shields and swords are fairly plain, as is the armour.

I certainly managed to get a copy of RQ1 in the UK when it came out, I think as a result of seeing adverts in White Dwarf. Can't remember if it was by post or in a shop though! The RQ2 box set I have is the Games Workshop version. Not sure how many of those 5000 copies of RQ1 would have made it to the UK at that time.

From that group it sounds like you should cross planes to the Tragic Millennium!

Completely agree. I much prefer to have a setting like this. Thanks for the mention of Back to Balazar - I'd not come across it before.

The two separate boxed sets of the initial AH RQ in the UK were about £40 each in 1984 (and that's £40 then, not £40 now). Luckily those were the days when students still got grants, and beer was about 50p/pint. I believe a similar thing happened with the Empire of the Petal Throne box Gardasiyal - it was also expensive and paper cover rulebooks (not a bad set of rules but hardly any Tekumel info in it)

I used to amuse myself in the early 90s going into Games Workshop stores and asking if they had any copies of Runequest...

I have to say that I did watch their Call of Cthulhu 5 part playthrough and really enjoyed it - they had the rules down mostly and the GM was very good at evoking the right atmosphere.

Flashing Blades (also FGU) and its supplements would also provide useful/stealable info, d20 based but easily convertible to d100. Pretty good game in its own right too. The High Seas book includes rules for ships, and a mini campaign including possibility (or not) of some voodoo being involved.

I suspect that you are right - this may well be the way a lot of games go. However it does come with a significant downside in that it removes a lot of the flexibility of GMs and players to arbitrate rules and change/invent things on the fly, which for me is one of the major strengths of RPGs. D&D 5+ is already heading this way with classes and powers predefined (pretty much the nature of a class system) in a much more constrained way that 0e, 1e, 2e or even 3e did. I don't mind 5e - it works well, but it does tend to shoehorn people into what the rules say, and once you've got a hard-coded rules implementation it starts becoming difficult to change things without unintended consequences and/or people saying "but that's not what the rules say". I play a lot of board games, and I am quite happy there to thrash out the exact meanings of rules, in RPGs not so much as I prefer them to allow for creativity in interpretation. (Strangely enough I came across a couple of slide rules the other day and was thinking about learning to use them!)

Advantage in RQ2 usually came about as a result of ganging up on people - most people only got 1 Attack and 1 Parry unless they had two weapons, so if two of you attacked an opponent they could usually only parry one of you. RQG changed this with the -20%(?) per parry/dodge, but you can still run people down if there's enough of you...

Any chance of a POD version?

I watched the first one and am finding it hard to muster any enthusiasm for the others. Continually saying how hard the rules are, and then making it obvious that no-one seemed to have done much actual reading of the rules beforehand seemed weird to me, but I find that in a lot of streamed games. If I'm running something new I make sure I know it fairly well, and if I were streaming (which thankfully I'm not) I would be making even more certain I had a decent grasp of it. Also I got a bit annoyed at the constant "oh here's some names and words that don't mean anything to me so I'll just dismiss them" thing. Either take time to explain stuff or don't mention it until later.

Agreed - I don't see why ROW should be delayed because of UK stupidity

Yelorna for me too. Which is ok except for the, you know, not being an Amazon in any way...