Here's a scenario: a PC cleric grows to say, 3rd level, and the player decides that the PC is moved by the idea that their clerical powers could be used to help society as a whole rather than fight monsters. They decide to retire the PC to a community with the intention of using their abilities to help improve their quality of life, including training new acolytes as circumstances allow.
This could happen in any campaign, as it's a player decision. How would you, as the DM, extrapolate that retired PC's effects going forward?
Depends... When I extrapolate it is more at a societal level. It also depends on the time frame. Over the next couple of months? Not much. Five years later, twenty years later? Much more. The degree that the players interact with the village is also pretty important as that determines how much thought I put toward it.
Let's say the PC retires to a village in a borderland zone (1). Let's also say they're a bit out of the way so Shepard River is the only magical healer in the area. There may be a woodwife or cunning man in the village, which would be very helpful in supplying medications and local lore to Shepard River.
As long as there is only one really bad thing that happens a day, the cleric would be able to fix it. A broken leg from a logging accident can be fixed good as new with a combination of
cure wounds and
lesser restoration. If they can live with a limp for a while,
cure wounds would be enough. In combination with
augury they would be a boon to maternal mortality. Being able to prevent or treat catastrophic blood loss with cure wounds and stop strep infection in infants with lesser restoration is a tremendous advantage. I would also expect someone who became a semi-specialist in clerical maternal care would develop
couvade, a spell that transferred some labor pains to the father. This would undoubtedly increase maternal and infant survival as well as increase general empathy. This would increase survival from 1:100 to more like 1:1000, when a number of interventions occurred in the US, including the availability of PCN.
In my campaign, there are many priests but few clerics. I would expect a devotional shrine to be developed immediately. With the growth of population, barring any terrible monstrous attack (2), this would likely develop to a chapel within 20 years, about one generation. There is likely to be 1-2 subordinate
clerics should that progress. I'd have to look up how many subordinate priests / monks would be there from my tables.
As it happens, I did have a 7th level PC cleric retire a few years ago. They decided to reclaim a temple near the local "Mordor", and invested his wealth accordingly. It became a forward base for a number of adventurers, and the local polities also came to see its value. It is now a fortified small town, and was in fact used as the forward base to throw down the Ivory Queen and reclaim the city of Shodan. There was about 6 real years and 12 game years between the two points.
(1) Civilized, Borderland, Wilderness; determines monstrous encounters, level of infrastructure both within the area and connection to the capitol / general resources.
(2) That's hard to predict the outcome there since that's below a societal vantage. The village will do better with an actual cleric on their side, certainly. If it became important I would probably game it out.
