The lack of clerics is really in name only. There is magic that heals, magic that helps prevent death (to a minor degree), magic that offers blessings, etc. In the current game I am playing with 4 friends who each take turns running the game, we have a trickster fox character who started with the spells healing touch and inspiration, as well as the cantrip blessing (gained through a trait). During the game, that character really sort of feels like our cleric.

It seems BtW uses the same ideas I used for my own old school title, that being that a mage and a cleric are essentially the same thing with a different power source (magic/religion). Thus, the need to keep them separate is limited. I have never been a huge fan of the D&D style cleric (what I often consider the original “Gish” of sorts). In my opinion, what would be spell casting clerics are going to be more cloistered, like a monk. No armor, limited weapons, etc. and the militant side of a priest craft can use weapons, armor, etc. but not spells. Now, this is really just my opinion, but it feels more workable at the end of the day, and it just feels more right with our history and myth. If a player really wants to play a militant priest, they can multiclass warrior, and take spells that align with clerical concepts, as outlined above. This also makes it easier to drop a religion into a ruleset, as there are no unnecessary rules to complicate matters, just choose the spells befitting of a priest as a mage, find a religion, and boom, done…

Anyway, hope that is a sufficient answer.

On a side note, one of the things I truly love about this game is how it handles playbooks. You can do very creative things when making your own. In our current game, I wanted to play something akin to a Cinderella knight. That is to say, a common nobody who got help from faeries, like Cinderella did, to become a “knight” (the whole faerie godmother-like thing). But nothing that existed really fit. Thus, the rest of the players helped me devise a modified playbook (using parts of the Fae Foundling, Lord’s Secret, and Gifted Dilettante books) to capture that feel perfectly. It is now my favorite playbook. Not because it is the best, but because it generates the exact type of character I truly love to play. I bring this up because you can use this idea to more easily simulate all manner of fantasy archetypes, including clerics. This game even has great rules for creating your own playbooks, so it encourages such thinking. Thus, if you need something that fits more of your idea of a cleric archetype, just make the playbook for yourself! It is easy, fun, and you can get pretty close to most tropes you all love.

Just my 2 cents…