Iron Heroes

""You are not your magic weapon and armour. You are not your spell buffs. You are not how much gold you have, or how many times you've been raised from the dead. When a Big Bad Demon snaps your sword in two, you do not cry because that was your holy avenger. You leap onto its back, climb up to its head, and punch it in the eye, then get a new damn sword off of the next humanoid you headbutt to death.""

There are games where magic is common place, where elves and dwarves walk amongst men and at worst hear an inordinate amount of giggling when they order a short, where death is so cheap that PCs have rooms in heavenly motels on permanent reserve, where being a wizard is just another job...

Iron Heroes is not such a game.

Iron Heroes is a low fantasy game that sets out to capture the feel of stories like Robin Hood or Conan the Barbarian where heroes are capable of almost anything but magic is either non-existent or a dangerous and unpredictable force that can prove as dangerous to its users as to it targets. It does so quite well. It has no established setting, there are a few pointers but the material it does provide is meant to slot into any setting you make up for it. It uses the 3rd edition d20 system rules with some alterations, principle of which are:
 * Armour gives Damage Reduction rather than making you harder to hit (shields still make you harder to hit).
 * To compensate all classes have a Defense Bonus that increases with level.
 * All classes have better than what Dungeons & Dragons would deem "good save progression" for all saves, to make up for there being no magical items to improve it.
 * Two classes have access to an attack bonus that increases at a rate of 1.25 per hd when using certain weapons.
 * Many classes have abilities that relay on tokens that are gained by doing certain things such as aiming.
 * A mastery system for feats that makes certain feats easier to get for certain classes and turns most feats into their own feat tree.
 * Everyone has two pools of Hit Points, "normal" and "reserve". Mundane healing restores reserve hit points that slowly transfer into your regular hit points outside of combat as cuts stop bleeding, concussion clears and so on.

Each class is more or less a heroic archetype of the ass kicking verity, with the only outwardly magical class being totally optional. The classes in the core book are:
 * Arcanist (Optional): A wizard who prefers to avoid using actual spells for fear of life or sanity threatening backfires.
 * Archer: A master of ranged combat. Rains death from afar.
 * Armiger: A specialist in maximising his armour?s protection. When he is attacked everyone benefits.
 * Berserker: Exactly what it says on the blood splattered tin. Gets tokens for his class abilities when angry or when hit.
 * Executioner: A master of stealth kills and crippling hits.
 * Harrier: A common feature of d20 system games is that melee combat only really works if you are stationary, the harrier averts this as one of the few working hit and run classes out there.
 * Hunter: The smart guy who uses the terrain and his allies as his most deadly weapons, giving the latter bonuses by using the former.
 * Man at Arms: The ultimate generalist, able to adapt to all combat situations by both having more feats than anyone else and wildcard feats that he can change each day.
 * Thief: Silver tongued and sticky fingered, the thief can fight in a similar but less effective way than the Executioner, but is more at home out of combat than in it.
 * Weapon Master: The single most powerful class with the one weapon he chooses but sub-optimal with all others.