[joncarryer]

This does sound like a lot of fun.

Regarding your question about god-granted magic, I've tended to follow the advice that you create a list of spells for each god out of the regular spell lists, and then followers can take any of these without need for pre-requisites, which is balanced by only being able to take spells that are on the short-list.

I've been doing similar things in my own fantasy Europe; for the time being, my campaign is focused in Viking Scandinavia, but I'm slowly building the background info on Anglo-Saxon England, Carolingian Frankia, Republican Rome, Classical Greece, pre-Ptolemaic Egypt, and an Arabian-Nights-esque Persian Middle East, for when my PC's start roaming further afield.

In my campaign, there is no return of the gods and magic, as they've been there all along. This means I have to do a lot more re-writing of history than you, as I have to consider the influences and effects of magic and gods from the get-go, instead of just from a specific change-point, but it wouldn't be any fun without a challenge, right? :-)

For me, the overt presence of gods in society is happening in Republican Rome, where worship and respect for gods declined along with the Republic, until Julius, in his role as pontifex maximus, struck a deal with the gods as part of reshaping the Republic as he wanted it to be, in which they made all of the Italian peninsula (at this point Julius had swung citizenship for all Italians, but no-one else) a low-mana, but high-sanctity (for Roman gods) area. Roman magi lost a lot of their power within the borders of Rome, and very few would wish to sacrifice being Roman for having their full magical powers. The priesthoods and the military grew in power, and Rome as a whole turned inward and focused on the transition to nation-hood.

In my Greece, on the other hand, the priesthoods have generally focused on serving the gods and left mortal matters to others, and the gods have (for the most part) stuck to godly affairs and had a pretty laissez-faire attitude to anything outside of Olympus, as the amount and quality of worshipping has been maintained at an acceptable level. Meanwhile, this thaumaturge/philosopher by the name of Aristocles (appearing a lot earlier in my history, back near the beginnings of Greek civilisation) had these ideas about the ideal society and, with the power of magic to back him up (which ability is quite rare among the Greeks), and showing the proper respect for the gods at all times, managed to institute it as a model of rulership in his native Athens, from where it eventually spread throughout the Hellenic world (from Macedonia and Thrace down to Sparta, most of the larger Mediterranean islands, and making gradual inroads on Asia Minor). So, in the current time of the game, Greece is a thaumarchy, with a thaumaturge as the leader of each polis, and all of them together ruling as a council over all the greek city-states, and each polis organised roughly according to Plato's Republic, with thaumaturges in the place of philosophers.

Hope you find this ramble interesting, and possibly of some help in your own world.