The classes of AiME are chosen because they work for Tolkien, but they aren’t limited to Tolkien in any sense. There’s a lot of close reworks of existing 5e classes alongside new material, but the subclasses are all-or-nearly-all new.

I have a hard time with this argument in a general sense. Flippy ninja tree guy that stands in place is pretty much just drunken master :p

Oh, I’ve played every edition to date, so I’m well aware that D&D has always “defaulted” to something more on the High Fantasy end of the spectrum. 3.x and 4e seem, IMHO, to have been the highwater mark for that, with lower level BECMI and lower level 2e being the lowest ebb.

3.x saw the great “Iron Heroes” supplement from Malhavoc Press. Although that book relied on more or less replacing the PHB with a whole new one. I’ve heard good things about the LotR supplement for 5e and will probably get it sooner or later. My concern there is that it might tie things too much to Tolkien’s legendarum and not work in other settings.

Plus, as someone who mostly plays in and GMs for the Adventurers’ League these days, what I really want is an option that I can use in regular, bog-standard, D&D: A paladin and ranger archetype that arrests its Spellcasting advancement at third level, but gains other tricks to compensate.

Yeah, literally no edition of D&D offers what you’re asking for. Maybe ironically, a rule set adapting Tolkien to the 5e chassis (Adventures in Middle-Earth) is a great low-magic ruleset, and could be turned to sword-and-sorcery quite easily.

In most of the “sword and sorcery” stories, magic was a rare and mysterious force. Mostly used by the villains and if anyone on the protagonists’ side was a magician, they had probably devouted most of their lives to developing fairly low-end effects. The protagonists generally were men of action: combining intelligence, martial prowess, and luck in equal measure.

D&D has been diverging from that formula since nearly Day One. So I get that it must not be what the market is hungry for… But I would like to see some of the “half caster” classes, like Ranger and Paladin, be given some sort of “Reverse Eldritch Knight” archetype option that _removes_ Spellcasting and replaces it with non-magical, skill-based tricks.

Not to get all jargon-y here, but we might call Planar Warrior something like a “broad-spectrum ignore,” where you get to turn off a potentially wide range of the target’s abilities. Only in serious corner cases are you turning off more than three resistances at a time (like when you apply a blade poison to your flametongue slashing weapon, and toss in your d6 force damage), but still.

From another perspective, it’s like saying: “Relative to the amount of damage my allies do to this thing, I am critting 100% of the time.”

The Primeval Guardian’s new battle cry: “I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I OH GODDAMMIT JOSS.”

Anyway, I greatly dislike this feature, and Portal Lore is dumb. As you point out, it is Primeval Awareness in small scale, but it has the added probably of being TOO useful at the same time.