Priest Adventures (CPrH)

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The DM may want to slant some of his campaign's adventures specifically to his priest player-characters. It's not hard to do that; he has only to build the adventure around one or more of the priest's duties or responsibilities.
The priest-oriented plot device we use to motivate the priest to action is called a Hook. To design an adventure around the priest character, the DM has to provide a hook that will bring the priest into the adventure, and do so in such a way that the adventure doesn't exclude the other player-characters.
The hook must address the priest in one of his priestly roles or duties. Below we present a variety of hooks and approaches to this sort of adventure.
==Advisor of the Faithful==
The priest provides guidance to the flock. Followers of the temple come to him for advice, and he's supposed to give it.
That advice can't be correct all the time, especially when the faithful come to him with no-win situations. When it goes wrong, the priest will probably feel guilty. When it goes disastrously wrong, and the injured party comes to the priest for help, the priest will probably be willing (if not anxious) to clean the situation up.
As an example of this hook, let's say a doting father comes to the priest with this story: His son has come to him and asked for money so that he can buy weapons and armor. His son has heard of a bandit encampment where there is much treasure to be found. The son is sure that with the right weapons and armor and a little luck he can sneak into the camp when most of the bandits are gone, defeat the guards, and make off with the treasure. The father doesn't know where the encampment is; his son won't tell him. The son is a good fighter and knows what he's talking about; on the other hand, he is youthful and a bit overconfident. The father asks "Should I give my son the money for this equipment?"
If the priest says Yes, the father does so. The son tries the raid but is captured after killing several bandits. The bandits send back his bloody, broken sword from their mystery encampment, with a ransom demand which the father (and even the PCs) cannot match.
If the priest says No, the father follows his advice. The son tries it anyway, and is captured because he was under-equipped; no bandits died. Again, the son is ransomed beyond the father's means.
If the priest says "Maybe, but my friends and I would like to get in on it," the father will take him to talk to the son. The son will sound agreeable to the proposition, but will sneak off at first opportunity. He doesn't want anyone else horning in on his adventure. And because he had to charge off prematurely, he doesn't know enough about the bandit encampment and is caught up in snares set around its perimeter. Here, again, he's captured and ransomed.
In either of these three cases, the father comes back to the priest to say, in effect, "Your lousy advice got my son captured, and I can't ransom him! Please save him!" Which the priest will be inclined to do...  and he'll probably want to have his friends, the other PCs, along with him.
Incidentally, we don't recommend that you face your PCs with no-win situations such as the one above very often. It wouldn't be fair to do this time and time again; the players would (correctly) assume that they could never do anything right unless the DM arbitrarily wanted them to.
==Agent of the Priesthood==
When the priest is a low-level character, still near the bottom of the totem pole of the priesthood's hierarchy, his superiors will frequently send him on missions. A mission could be nothing more than "Take this letter over to the priest Aclastion in the next village," or it could be "There's supposed to be some horrible monster menacing our temple in the next village; do you suppose you could round up some of your more violent friends and go over there and destroy it for us?"
In the latter case, you have a situation where the priest character is the center of attention, and has ample reason and opportunity to invite his non-priest friends in on the action.
==Defender of the Faith==
When the followers of one faith make war on the followers of another, the priests get involved in the action. Since these wars tend to take place between entire cultures, the player-character priest will probably be an ally of the other player-characters. In this case, his temple superiors are likely to ask him to round up some capable allies and go on dangerous missions into enemy territories, or to hold a crucial mountain pass during a military campaign.
==Defender of the Faithful==
You read about Libels in the Designing Faiths chapter, under "Duties of the Priest," under "Vigilance." (If you didn't, you should now.)
When the faithful are threatened by such a libel, the priest must work against it; if he doesn't, or if he fails, his people will suffer more prejudice and be in more danger from people who believe the libel. (There will be enough who still believe the libel if it is proved false; if the characters can't prove it false, there will be many more believers still.)
In order to bring the other player-characters in on such a situation, try this technique: One fine day, the priest finds another priest (of the same temple) dead in his chambers. The dead man has been murdered, torn limb from limb. His chambers were barred shut from the inside; a thief could not have picked the bars. In the priest's hand is part of a page from his journal, and the rest of the journal is missing. The scrap of paper, written in his hand, is part of a longer chronicle: "in mortal danger. When the {insert the name of an enemy temple} summon the thing, it will kill him and we will be blamed. I know they work from the Citadel of Arbright, but could find out no more; I think perhaps they heard me as I listened to their talk. It is time for me to tell — " There the passage ends, obviously when the priest was interrupted by his murderer. 
This puts the priest-character and his temple in a delicate situation. Obviously, the enemy temple will summon up some sort of monster to kill some person, probably an important person, and the priest's temple will get the blame. Obviously, the summoned thing, whatever sort of monster it is, can penetrate locked chambers without violating the locks and bars.
The priest and his temple have to know more. But the authorities will not allow them to search the Citadel of Arbright, home of a powerful local family, on this flimsy and perhaps fabricated evidence. Therefore, the priest must sneak in, find out what is to be found out, and escape. He'll need the help of his friends...
And what they do find out, of course, is that the Clan Arbright is aiding the enemy temple. They together have found a way to summon an outer-planar creature into sealed chambers, and they plan to do this some night when the High Priest of the player-character's temple is closeted with the king. The being will kill the king and leave the high priest to take the blame, resulting in damage, perhaps permanent damage, to the faith...  unless the priest-PC and his friends can thwart the plan.
==Martyr for a Cause==
The priest's god or the rules of the priestly order might force the priest to undertake some actions that the local authorities just don't understand or approve of. (See below, under "Society's Punishments," for more on this.) If the priesthood is not protected against prosecution by the secular (non-priestly) authorities, then the priest might find himself on trial for any illegal action performed in the god's name.
Gods usually don't appear in court as defense witnesses. Therefore, the priest-PC must defend himself through legal means without the benefit of divine testimony. If he's convicted, he might have to escape jail to avoid execution; he might even choose to accept execution in order to dramatize the injustice of his plight. Or, the court might sentence him to some suicidal mission to atone for the crime he committed. He isn't required by the court to go on the mission alone, but no NPC adventurers want to march with him into certain doom. Thus the priest character is again brought into an adventure because of his faith, and his friends the other PCs, if they truly are his friends, will accompany him on this quest. 
==Servant of the God==
The god himself will sometimes send the PC on missions. Often, he will appear to the PC when he is alone, or will appear to him in dreams, and make his wish known: "You will travel to the wild lands of the Sylvan Curtain and there find the artifact known as the Eagle-Spear. Find it; take it from our enemies, who hold it; bring it back and install it in your temple... "  
When he investigates the Sylvan Curtain and the Eagle-Spear, the priest will find that it's certain death to go there alone. He needs adventurers of all descriptions and abilities to help him if he's to pull off this adventure successfully...