My PC's are currently running through "Shadowed Keep", from Raging Swan, and I needed some detail for the village they were using as home base for their expeditions into the keep. Shadowed Keep is awesome but it takes several sessions to complete, and it starts to feel like a grind with no possibilities for side-quests and no flavorful descriptions of NPC's and shops in the town the PC's return to after clearing part of the keep. My players were starting to grumble that it was all hack and slash, and I was fumbling to answer their questions about where they could shop and stay in town. I was pressed for time and I didn't want to flesh out a village from scratch, so for $2.00 it was a no-brainer to try "The Forsaken Churchyard" from Alvena Publishing. It proved to be the perfect compliment to the adventure I was running, as it shared many of the design strengths I appreciate so much about Creighton Bradhurst's Raging Swan Press.
The name of the game with Alvena Adventures seems to be efficiency. Everything is hyperlinked to the PRD for those of us that run games from an iPad or laptop. NPC's are statted out and have at least one flavorful characteristic or mannerism that brings them to life by sparking DM creativity. The writing style is terse, evocative and eloquent. I was reminded of a column I read recently by Chris Perkins in which he recommended an essay on writing by Stephen King called "Imagery and the Minds Eye".
I read the 22 page PDF in about 15 minutes and felt ready to run the adventure the same night.
SPOILER:
The players showed up, expecting to leave the faceless town and go back to the keep, like the last few sessions. Instead they found themselves bumping into stumbling drunks who tried to commit suicide-by-adventuring-party, finding out about missing children, smelling sweaty dwarf beards, choosing between an upscale brothel and an apparently run-down inn that surprised them with three fantastic meals a day including a rare steak dinner. Apparently generic encounters like a mugging in an ally surprised them by being very challenging and requiring skill checks, roll playing, and clever tactics to resolve without tragic results. A very memorable NPC was the cowardly half elf alchemist who seems to imbibe to freely of his own elixirs. He had a habit of talking in circles and repeating himself like Nicky Twotimes from goodfellas. This was uproariously funny at my table.
One of the strengths of this adventure was that it offered hooks for a side quest but could have served just as well as a scenic backdrop for the main adventure in progress if my players hadn't taken the bait. The minimal amount of prep needed meant nothing would have been wasted if my players hadn't chosen to save the children. I am always looking for ways to provide meaningful player choice, and "Forsaken Churchyard" delivered in spades.
The combat encounters are designed to be extremely challenging, without exceeding the CR budget for an appropriate encounter for APL. Enemies use their gear, tactics, and environment to devastating effect. In turn, resources are provided for clever PC's to leverage to regain equal footing with their foes. This resulted in better immersion then I have seen at my table in some time as captivated players realized they were not guaranteed success or even survival. In the end they prevailed, and walked away feeling challenged, but not unfairly so.
My only complaint with Alvena Adventures is that I can't find any more to download. I don't know of any other product on the market that can provide 2 long hearty sessions of gaming from a 22 page PDF with 15 minutes of prep time. I have seen many adventure products provide rules for scaling the challenge level to different size parties of different levels but it has never been implemented as well as it is here. You can literally drop this adventure into any campaign for 3-7 PC's of levels 1-4 with no additional prep time to make it fit. For $2.00 this is a product no DM should overlook.
The absence of maps and the low page count will put off some prospective buyers, but this only because we have been trained to have a particular set of expectations about RPG products. The condensed format of the material is decidedly a strength, not a weakness, and maps would without a doubt have been superfluous. Anyone who can't draw a ten by ten room on a chessex mat, or jot down some tombstones scattered around to provide cover, should not be playing D&D. These tasks are only slowed down when the DM has to keep checking to make sure his depiction of the area adheres to a pretty map in the PDF which is fairly arbitrary in its dimensions to begin with. For me, the absence of maps in this adventure gave me liscence to use terrain tiles and accessories that had been collecting dust.
Strongly recommended.