When entering the fight with the Nameless God, you have to take mandatory fall damage. This makes it appear as if you are kneeling before the Nameless God. If you remember your very first conversation with the Scarecrow, he promised to make you do just that.
The Iron Ones is one of the most potent of faiths due to their reliance on technology, physical strength, and the will of man. And also because the Three are being impersonated by the Nameless God, who has imprisoned them and has been feeding off the prayers of their faithful. Quite literally, the Iron Ones are the only creed that isn't actively feeding the setting's Big Bad or following dying and weaker gods.
The Three are described as being the dominant religion of Askaria, a nation which is constantly at war with other countries. The other creeds, as they're discovered, reveal that they are relatively minor (The Betrayers, the Stone Root) or dying (Devara), save for the Iron Ones and the Fire and Sky creeds. While at first this just sounds like the typical dynamic of a rising religion displacing other, older religions, when you learn more about the nature of the Three, it explains why there has been centuries of warfare and why many other creeds are being slowly crushed, marginalized, or dying: the Nameless God, having taken over the Three, is pushing his duped followers to spread their religion as aggressively as possible to stamp out other creeds whose doctrines involve active worship and prayer. The reason for this is so that he can steal the prayers and devotion of the Three's followers to become a true god himself. By pushing the Three's followers to expand, crush other religions, and convert others at swordpoint, the Nameless God increases the number of people falsely giving him prayers. It also explains why the Three doesn't seem to care about the Iron Ones or the Fire and Sky creeds: their followers don't worship a god, so there's no point to crushing or trying to convert them. It would be a waste of time, resources, and valuable followers (and their prayers) to try and stamp out creeds of atheist warriors or powerful mages.
The strange appearance of anyone from Tristin makes more sense when you pay attention to the lore of the country. The Witch of the Lake has the same physical appearance as a Tristini player character, while the corpses seen in the Village of Smiles, also in Tristin, don't seem to have this appearance. Going by this, it appears that the reason why the Tristini have their bizarrely pale complexions and wide mouths is likely because of the extensive experiments done by the Architect in Salt Alkymancy - experiments so widespread that they fundamentally altered the very people who lived in that country.
Money for Nothing is a prominent trope in the game. As long as you're not buying "trinkets" and/or the Döppelsoldner armor set from the Beggar, or ammo from the merchants (and sometimes even then), you're going to be rolling in dosh. Even being resurrected only costs a tithing (10% of your money). To quote one of the "bible" verses in the skill tree, "The day may come when gold is like stones, but Salt is the most precious thing of all." And it is, really. The alchemists and smiths only charge salt, it's used to level up, and the option to buy salt from the Merchant to level up without fighting in an area you're not high enough for (or to recover what you lost to That One Boss) is available as a Frustration Modulator. It would seem that the prophecy has indeed come to pass, and this is a deliberate design choice-keep you loaded with shinies without even trying while keeping you constantly chasing salt.
The fact that gold is used as part of the resurrection process when you die seems to be just a gameplay mechanic, but the House of Splendor indicates that there's more to it. The House is absolutely crazy over gold, and their golden masks seem to stave off disease and their healing items use golden flakes. Gold itself seems to be a mechanism for healing and repairing failing flesh. However, since salt is a mechanism by which someone's strength of will and body are measured, salt is a much more valuable as a commodity while gold is seemingly only valued by an esoteric cult and merchants as a trade currency.
