Originally Posted by LurkytheDwarf
That's a rather elegant solution. I like the idea of the priest hierarchy being more political than crusading; instead they use paladins to enforce their edicts.
Glad you liked the suggestion, it seemed to fit what you had in mind.

Opening up the various paladin variants would work very well for representing the alignments of the different city gods. Alliances between the city-states would probably be tenuous and ever-changing, but they would also still be engaged in trade, both with each other and with other cultures outside their own region.

Originally Posted by LurkytheDwarf
So the world should probably be very wild…. Only rugged barbarian tribes dare dwell far out in the wilderness….
Since you envision immense wild regions across most of the world, there’s also room for a full spectrum of nature-related deities, including gods of forests and rivers, mountains and oceans, as well as gods of the hunt and of wild creatures. There would also likely be a god (or goddess) of the harvest, worshipped by small agricultural settlements not under the direct control of the temple-based religions of the city-states.

As you mentioned, adepts would be most likely to serve as shamans or priests for these gods, and in some cases rangers might serve as instruments of their divine will, much as the paladins would for the temple-based gods. There are probably a lot of small agricultural settlements scattered in the regions between wilderness on the one hand and the city-states on the other, and these settlements would likely rely on a fair number of rangers for defense.

Some of the city-states will probably not hesitate to raid the farming settlements for captive labor, and this could lead to a number of scenarios in which the rangers are defending their people against slaving parties led by paladins of the non-good temple gods, who are acting in their city-states’ interests by procuring labor to support their divinely ordained economies.

There will also most likely be pastoralist nomads, tribes of wandering herders who neither farm crops nor build cities, but rather inhabit areas that others consider wastelands, arid and semiarid regions where life is tough and breeds tough folk. The nomads will trade with both farmers and city merchants, but will occasionally raid them instead, and if conditions become more difficult in their homelands (from drought or tribal unrest) they may become conquerors and take over a series of villages or even a small city-state.

Individual adventurers may occasionally rise to enough power to do the same—gather followers and take a city-state or a small region for themselves. Everything would be in constant strife and flux, with city-states warring against each other and marauding nomads, agricultural settlements fighting for their freedom and to defend their harvest, with opportunists and freebooters everywhere.