Well, there's Dragon Warriors. That's twenty-five pounds plus shipping, straight from
Mongoose Publishing. Or twenty pounds, possibly without any shipping costs involved, at
Amazon.co.uk. All you need is the one book. Sure, the Bestiary is nice too,
but there are *plenty* of monsters in the core book, just without as much of the descriptive text, etc. There's even an intro adventure in the book, and some optional variant rules, if you feel so inclined. Oh, and at the Mongoose site, there's more of each of those things too, for free.
But of course it depends what you like, or might like. For example,
Mutants & Masterminds is a
brilliant one-book superheroes RPG,
and you can actually use the system without too much hassle, for a variety of other styles/genres and so on. According to an online currency converter, twenty five pounds is very close to forty US dollars, which is neat, eh? Couldn't see any new copies on amazon.co.uk, but Amazon.com has them at
this price, which, even with international shipping, should be under your limit. Anyway, it's an extremely flexible system with rules that can cover everything, and in this sense totally at the other end of the spectrum from Dragon Warriors, which is an extemely solid system with rulings easily made to cover everything that the rules don't.
And there's a number of alternatives in between those, as well. And further out, probably. And sideways, in another dimension altogether!
There are so many RPGs out there, it's hard sometimes to know where to start. . . or when to stop. . .
