The Ballad of Stanislav Benq has a simple yet elegant plot within it but extracting it and putting it together is not exactly easy.
The plot is thus: the PCs stumble upon some hilariously incompetent and aged Kislevites who moan and moan about being cursed because some artifact was taken from their town. They con(vince) the PCs to help them look for it, and the PCs naturally ask the people at the ex-pat Kislevite church of Ursun. Why exactly the Kislevites didn't ask him themselves isn't clear.
In the way of such things, other people are also looking for the item (they have in fact convinced the aged Kislevites they need it so they can be led to its location by them) so when the PCs talk to the old priest, they go and talk to him too, in a rather more violent fashion. Scared for his life, the priest tells the violent types that he had the macguffin but already gave it to the PCs. The violent men go and try to be violent to the PCs, asking them for the box they were given. The PCs are suspicious about this and go and see the priest again, who runs away while burning down his church. The PCs catch him easily, and the truth comes out (see below).
It's basically four encounters - hook, brief inquiry, combat, fire and I think it would take an average group about two hours or less and leave them saying "Is that it?" at the end. That said, it would certainly pass the time quite pleasantly. Especially given the amusing old Kislevites and the dash of Maltese-Falcon-esque game of 'who's got the suitcase'.
The problem, however, is in the backstory. First of all, there's way too much of it (and it comes before the adventure summary, which is very frustrating for the reader), but it also seems quite tortured in its logic. Long ago (about fifty years or so), Stanislav Benq and his fellow village folk were ordered by a cruel Kislevite noble to try and excavate a lost religious shrine, whatever the human cost to the diggers. Benq escaped and murdered the noble, and hammered home his vengeance by nicking the very same religious relic the noble was after. Now his son wants the relic back, so he hired some violent men to find it.
Meanwhile, the village have turned Benq into a folk hero, and have a legend about him leaving the village to chase after some thieves who stole a sacred object. Okay, it could happen that somebody saw Benq scarper and decided this made a better story. So the violent men convince the townsfolk that they are under a horrible curse because they lack the object Benq took, thus contradicting the legend. If I sound confused, it's because I am. But these gifted searchers get the whole town convinced that they must find Benq's object and they head south into the Empire. Somehow they end up at the adventure's location which can be anywhere in the Empire, but is suggested to be near Talabheim, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the Kislev border.
You'd suppose that the Kislevite scholars from the village worked out this is where Benq had gone but the adventure goes out of its way to say they just headed off in one direction like the morons they are. How they happened to end up in exactly the right village, literally a hundred yards from their goal, is not clear.
Also over the passing fifty years, the folk tale of Benq the rebel hero has been turned into everyone's favourite fireside song in the Empire. By either being an entertainer or paying one a few coins, they can get to hear it. One obscure line at the end of the second part mentions that Benq finds a priest on his journey, and there finds peace. From this, the PCs are supposed to deduce the need to talk to a priest - a very tenuous step.
What the song doesn't say is that Benq changed his name and became said priest, which is why he has the box in the first place. Said folk song was invented by a troubadour who had heard the folk tale in Kislev and wanted to get the full background from the man himself. How he too managed to work out from a curious folktale with half the details wrong that Benq had travelled almost a thousand miles to one specific village and changed his name when he got there is left as an exercise for the reader to explain.
It's a shame that the story is so convoluted and confused because the idea of mangled folk-tales is a good one (see The Legend of Wolfgang van Horn, for example) and very WFRP-esque. It's also a shame that this back-story and its sloppy presentation almost obscure the fun parts of this adventure, which although extremely short, is a passable tale of hide the macguffin with some fun NPCs. I've previously reviewed PV works where the ideas were better than the actual plots, here the case is the opposite, and maybe this plot could be used with one of the other settings. So: plunderable, but not stellar in itself.
