I've mostly finished writing up the setting for that Pathfinder game I want to run on the forum, but I need input on something: I don't know how to deal with a low-magic Pathfinder game.
To sum things up, the setting is more or less Europe with things merged, switched around, new backstories written up, and the names and details changed for the sake of brevity, clarity, and not offending anyone. (In short, there's a huge Anglo-Saxon/Frankish/German empire in the west, a Russian/Wendish republic in the east, a Celtic kingdom in the northwest, an Italian kingdom I'm not entirely satisfied with yet in the southeast, Viking tribes in the north, and Finno-Ugric tribes in the northeast, with basic outlines written out for another continent with Arabian-, Iranian-, and Turkish-themed nations.) The setting exclusively contains humans, but I intend to allow (modified) dwarves and half-elves, albeit as characters whose bloodlines go back to dwarves and elves back in the age of myth rather than as outright dwarves and half-elves. There's three major belief systems: a modified version of Celtic polytheism, followed by everywhere but Not!Scandinavia and Not!Finland, and straight-up Norse and Finnish paganism, followed by their respective derivative ethnic groups.
I want a relatively gritty game where magic is the territory of gods and beings that have long since disappeared from mortal view. I intend for the players to someday fight these strange and terrible beasts and perhaps obtain items and weapons of divine origin, but I want the game to be by and large low fantasy; I want a game where the players are morally ambiguous people who fight morally ambiguous or outright villainous people, whether for honor, for gold, for justice, or for power, and all of this with steel and cunning rather than magic and sparkles. I have no clue how to make this work in the context of Pathfinder--perhaps five or six classes in the SRD use no magic at all, and probably seven or eight if I'm being generous or restrictive with archetypes. I could allow the half-magic classes like bard or ranger, but for some reason "magical realism' doesn't really feel right in the same sentence as "gritty", so to speak.
Ideas? I was thinking of a middle ground where players can play as partial casters who've had their spell lists excised of the spells that can't be explained as extraordinary luck or skill (e.g., the ranger's 1st-level spell list would have things like "alarm", "entangle", and "summon nature's ally" removed, but stuff like "longstrider" and "magic fang" can stay), but I don't know if that's worth it.