One possibility is a hierarchy of cults. We already have that to an extent with Seven Mothers--the 7Moms cult has six common-magic subcults, but if you progress far enough in any of them, you can go into the home empire and join the main cult for your favored Mother. You start off in 7Moms with a focus on, say, Irripi Ontor, but you progress to being a member of the cult of Irripi Ontor proper.
So there might be hero-cults or suchlike, which provide a non-lunar face for the Seven Mothers cults. e.g. there might be a great Tarshite warrior--call him Hal--who was one of the first great converts to the Lunar way (he worshipped Yanafal Tarnils). Hal is worshipped as a common-magic cult, providing non-Lunar warrior feats, available to concentrated theists. Since he's really just an interface into the Lunar cult, his feats are misapplied worship--but that makes it available to concentrated theists, though they do have to pay the non-concentrated cost.
If you get deeply enough into the cult of Hal, you transfer your cult membership to Seven Mothers: Yanafal, which provides similar feats, except they're Lunar magic instead of straight theism (but you could transfer your skills over, at least to an extent). And if you get deeply enough into *that*, you progress to the full-on, non-common-magic cult of Yanafal Tarnils.
> I'm not suggesting that this progression of worship is necessarily
> formulated or planned in any systematic form, but the steady
> conversion of foreign cultures might often take a path that
> approximates misapplied worship --> proper worship of the Lunar Way
> in game terms.
I'd bet that even if the Lunars didn't start off with this plan, they would've adopted it whole-heartedly once they found it happening. e.g. If they saw that, say, the Red-Hair Tribe has a (misapplied worship) animist tradition that provides access to the Lunar spirits, they'd make sure that knowledge of this tradition was provided to the Praxians and Grazelanders and Blue Moon trolls.
Perhaps the first couple of times, it happened accidentally--the Lunars just happened to notice frontier barbarians with MW versions of Lunar cults. But once they'd seen it happen, they might set out doing it actively--creating misapplied sorcery cults for Carmania and the West, misapplied theism for Dragon Pass, etc. Among other things, it would be a natural career path for a Lunar hero hoping for godhood--the hero could quest to *become* the misapplied-worship face of some Lunar cult.
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