Benoit de Bernardy is an excellent adventure designer. However, he’d be the first to admit that A Lesson in Love, an adventure where you need to rescue a missing elf, is not his best work. Released as DDAL07-11 for the Tomb of Annihilation series of D&D Adventurers League adventures, it’s one of the few adventures I’ve lost interest in while DMing.
There are a few reasons for this. The first is that it requires the adventurers to have specific spells in order to progress through the adventure, with remove curse and water breathing being the main ones in question. This is acceptable for most published adventures. In an Adventurers League adventure, you need to provide a solution in case the party is comprised of three fighters.
The second is the adventure’s structure. It’s too convoluted for its own good. The introductory “investigation” to discover the plot is quite linear and dull. It doesn’t provide the players with a lot of clues about what’s going on later, and requires entirely too many stages. After that, during the underwater section, you get subquests of the form of “you can finish A when you solve B, but to solve B you need to do C”. Oh, you can’t cast remove curse? You may be in trouble!
The third is the presentation of information, which occasionally overloads the players and DM. I’m thinking primarily of the interaction with the merfolk and sea elves; we found it tricky to separate out what was important to the plot.
The fourth is that one important encounter is a reference to an encounter in Tomb of Annihilation. Please make these self-contained! A convention DM is unlikely to have the book handy!
Is it all bad? No, there’s still much good design. The underlying story is an excellent one, and there are many interesting incidents. The sunken ship is a fantastic idea, and includes some unsettling encounters worthy of a good horror movie.
Honestly, I probably would have enjoyed it more if I removed the section with the sea elves and merfolk and expanded the exploration of the ship.
The final section, where you need to rescue the elf who you were originally sent to find, requires a certain amount of ingenuity on the players’ part, and is made much easier by having a party that is willing to negotiate in bad faith and to engage in combat once the deception can go no further. This is the sort of thing that can lead to great stories later on.
There’s a good adventure within A Lesson in Love, but I think it needed more pruning. Too many ideas, not always the right place for them!
I agree entirely with your review. Having class/spell requirements is very problematic in AL modules since party composition can be almost anything, and nothing at the start of the adventure would clue in players that they should play specific characters here. Given that the adventure itself features a friendly spellcaster as a major NPC, the problem could have easily been avoided.
I have two additional problems with the adventure:
The first is that it’s too long, especially if there’s an Order of the Gauntlet character in the party (which adds an extra combat). The adventure really could have trimmed the beginning section since it’s the least relevant and least fun part of the module.
The second and more major problem is that at one point, the adventure directs the DM to read Tomb of Annihilation to run a particular encounter. As a rule, AL modules only require core books and maybe Xanathar’s to run properly; they should never require the DM to own and carry another adventure book. It’s particularly egregious here because the necessary information in ToA fits on a single page, so it could have been reproduced or summarized here. The ToA information is actually necessary to run that part of the adventure; the DM can mostly skip or handwave it if they don’t have the book, but that does a big disservice to the narrative.
The adventure has some great moments, and the story is very interesting, but its mechanical execution can use some work.