Well, someone looking for less scaling and more sword & sorcery...my personal favorite fantasy RPG is:

Blade of The Iron Throne

Essentially Sword & Sorcery, The Game.

What It Brings

1) A system where to quote one of my players, “it lets you feel powerful, and be powerful - like it feels good to chop down a mook in one blow - but you can still die from a spear to the face”. Essentially characters start at Hollywood Human and don’t grow much past there...but “leveling up” really isn’t the point. It’s the sort of power where if there is a monster or demon, it plays more like Alien than Aliens. Grendel is not a push over.

2) Direct player involvement in the story. Players set their own motivations, which are then mechanically rewarded as both XP and power while doing that. Example: I had one player decide he wanted to get revenge on a man who has driven him out of the king’s guard. That became an NPC, part of the plot I could weave in, a couple cool fights, and actually rewarded the player for following what he said his story was.

3) A beautiful melee combat system. One where you have a boatload of discrete options, and they all have their place - and where player skill can often compensate for character builds. It’s the type of system where a rapier through the throat will kill a man, while the classic arming sword is going to ping ineffectually off of chain mail in most cases (the preferred method is to reverse it for a Murder Stroke, using the pommel to bash someone into a daze before stabbing him in an unarmored or only gambesoned weak point - and fights in plate with anything less than big mass weapons are likely to end with someone grappling the other guy and trying to break an arm or render him immobile to stab him in the eye slit). A beautiful system for both mook chopping and big dramatic duels.

4) A low magic magic system. Magic is mysterious, ritualistic, and powerful, but is more on the lines of curses, prophecies, ancient secrets, and hypnosis than it is “flying invisible lightning blaster man who heals!”. In other words, properly terrifying but not your default answer for everything.

What It’s Not

It’s not high fantasy. This is not a system for a sorcerer, a warlock, and a vampire kin to save the world in daily feats of demigod ness. It’s a system for humans (or humanoids with a hack) to pursue goals that are far more personal in scale.

It’s not one die and done. The dice run smooth once you know what you’re doing, there is crunch comparable to D&D.

It’s not a big commercial project. Not going to lie, the rule book could use some editing and layout changes. Certainly not a disaster, but it isn’t as polished as some.