If you guessed "He ran Stygian Fox's Forget Me Not from their recent The Things We Leave Behind", you're either actually a Yithian and come from the future, or you have played this ungodly hell-spawn of a scenario before. In any case, if any game can give you the shivers, if any scenario can make you want to bathe in bleach, this is it. Those of you who've played it know why. Those of you that aren't familiar with it, but wanna run it... well, read on, but know that I warned you...
For those unaware, Forget Me Not is a sordid, modern tale about a group of Investigators who are all part of a film crew that gets tricked into entering an abandoned house and delving into Eihort's Labyrinth. In there, out of terror at the being's appearance, they all end up accepting his bargain, and the result is skin-crawlingly awful. Now, saddled with several thousand little hellspawn Broodlings under their skin and in their organs, the Investigators must find a cure for their condition, and fast - otherwise, they risk a terrible death. The catch? They can't remember anything that happened and wake up crashed on the side of the road in their totaled van. Whether that's due to the crash or to Eihort using Cloud Memory on them is up to the gentle Keeper's discretion. Either way, they're amnesiac and in very, very big trouble. Can they discover what's happened to them before it's too late, or are they Brood chow?
Yes, the alien parasite inside you is a horror cliche, and yes, the setup of it occurring in a small town in Eastern Michigan is also cliche, as is the amnesia... but as TV Tropes has so eloquently taught us, Tropes Are Not Bad. The way these tropes interplay works well, even once your unknowing players figure the plot out - and they're sure not to until they well and truly search out every clue possible. Once they know, it's a mad race to uncover how to fix their affliction, and depending how soon they choose to go back to the House on McCumsey Road, where all this horror began, the scenario can occur quickly or be quite short. For our group, it took us two sessions, mostly because none of us thought to just go back to the damn house to start with even after we found the info relating to it. This surprised our Keeper too, who was damn sure he made all the trails clear. But eh, live and learn I guess, right?
Of course, this creepy set-up is even more eloquently brought to life by the place it occurs in - a normal small town, one which our Keeper happened to know quite well, and thus was able to characterize easily. He actually added quite a bit - implied Delta Green interference, a runaway girl who escaped a murderous captor only to later die when the Brood inside her were born (mentioned in the scenario but not otherwise elaborated on unless the Keeper so chooses), and little details like small-town diners and quirky if friendly residents. In fact, it's almost for the best if the players don't discover what's going on with them by going back to the house first, because that allows ever more clarification and flavor of the town to shine through. This greatly depends on the Keeper of course, but the way the town is characterized, all save the traitorous antagonistic Vanessa, is truly something to behold... with a bit of GM magic propping it up.
The props for the scenario are nice, but they're best developed by the Keeper themselves. Ours made three or four pages of police notes with terrible gory images of bodies that appeared exploded from the Brood escaping, which went a long way in bringing out the horror of the situation and hammering home just how screwed our characters were. It even made for a great cliffhanger! Yet another example of Keeper ingenuity and creativity done right. He even made an audio prop of screams, flesh tearing, and Eihort bellowing THEN DIE as we all were attacked in the intro prior to waking up. However, the props in the prop pack that comes with the scenarios in The Things We Leave Behind are all nicely done in their own right, a testament to how serious 7e CoC takes itself in making it easy for the Keeper to run the game, especially if they are short on time. And short on time Keepers can find another excellent help simply in the way the scenario is written out - it's much easier to parse than older supplements are, and not nearly as janky or mechanically grindy. Basically, it lays out the events the way they're intended to happen, and does so in a way that's not just a long list of items that begins with "If the Investigators do X" every sentence. It's clear, concise, explains events better, and doesn't skimp on the flavor text either, letting the Keeper know what to do but allowing the freedom for them to add their own details as desired. I don't know if it's the newer authors or that 7e in general is written in a more approachable way for newcomers, but it just feels a lot easier to read and understand what's going on to me in a way some older supplements aren't.
Overall, mechanically, the amnesia mechanic is handled well here, too - so much so I've found myself adapting it and applying it to other things. It simply asks the Keeper to have their players roll about four or so rolls, and uses those rolls for the SAN checks and skill checks prior to the events of the game, sort of secret skill rolls. I liked it so much I adapted the idea for raw trait generation in my extended run of Ripples From Carcosa/Tatters of the King, the idea there being that players would roll and keep a set of traits but scatter them around differently for different eras and characters in those eras. This allows the players some action, but also takes away autonomy, which goes a long way in creating a paranoid mood even before play begins, paranoia that just does not relent as the game goes on and the truth of the matter is revealed. And paranoid I was - I was just constantly on tenterhooks with this scenario, always afraid of what was going to happen to my poor character next, always terrified of how long I had left to live.
You want to give players nightmares? This is how you fucking do it. And yeah, I know it seems like I'm gushing here, but I just honestly don't have a lot of flaws to point out with Forget Me Not. I suppose there are some minor flaws I could bring up here, the first of which is the fact that there's implied rape undertones. Not even implied, depending on the Keeper. That might get too far under some players' skins for comfort, and should be addressed in as non-spoilery a way as possible or else left out entirely. There's plenty enough paranoia here to drive anyone up the wall with madness without it, and if you don't agree then you've never had lice, pinworms, bedbugs, or any other nasty parasitic creature in or on your person. Parasites that consume you from the inside out are already horrific enough, why was the undertone of rape also needed? Yeah, I know, it's a reasonable thing to assume when Eihort is involved, but surely there's other ways to deal with what happened to the Investigators than this. I'm just tired of seeing rape as drama and rape as a potential marker for horror. We get it. Rape is awful and horrific, and everyone knows this. Nobody in their right mind thinks rape is cool or in any way fun. This is one cliche that needs toning down, or eliminating altogether, if you ask me.
The second thing that bugged me slightly is the fact it seems to borrow a bit too heavily from another Eihort scenario, The Pale God from the much older supplement The Great Old Ones. Both involve Eihort's Labrynth being under a house in a small town, both involve the Brood bursting out of someone, and both hit almost the same exact notes as each other. The only difference is who gets implanted with the Brood, and that really bites considering that Eihort could have other avenues involved with him. Why not make a sort of Minotaur-like labyrinth thing going on with him, where people get sent in to die and must escape? How come we don't have any more elaboration on the Brood or what they inevitably turn into? Hell, I was so bothered by that last question that when I ran The Pale God, I made it much more about the Brood than about Eihort. Eihort himself was just a footnote, something that was there and hiding in the labyrinth to be avoided at all costs. Now, I haven't read enough about Eihort in fiction to know if houses with access to the Labyrinth are a thing, but it feels like every scenario Eihort's in is completely one-note. He feels like a one-trick pony, and that's hardly his fault, especially in how he's used. Come on, scenario ghouls, write something more exciting and different with this guy! He's creepy, and it's a shame he's not more well-utilized.
One last thing I was a bit alarmed with is how easy it is to die in this scenario as written without Keeper fiat - every reasonable course of action is a recipe for potential doom, maybe a bit too much so. Try to hunt down Vanessa and she catches you? Doomed. Fail to find the Revelations of Gla'aki in time and learn the one spell that can save you? Doomed. Have a character with too low CON/SIZ, and rolled too low on the 1d8 to determine how long you have before the Brood burst free? Doomed. Now, a super deadly scenario is fine, but it does make it really hard to put Forget Me Not into an overarching campaign. I might be biased here though, because I prefer the weird, pulpy end of things in my CoC games, not so much the misery and hopelessness humanity constantly faces, especially not in the sense of something the PCs couldn't really help. After all, they were merely tricked into a terrible situation, and it seems to me any decent Keeper would allow them at least some chance to save their character without making every other event a game over by misadventure.
In fact, that's just what our Keeper did - we got ourselves caught by Vanessa, so he decided to up the ante and the skill rolls so we could potentially get out of the situation last minute. Nobody likes to die out of nowhere, and CoC isn't WH40k - yeah the universe is dangerous, but it's not actively out to destroy humans, either. Humans are just caught in the crosshairs by mistake. It's out of place to just TPK the entire party for doing the wrong thing out of honest mistake, fear, or especially out of assuming it was the right thing to do. Unless it's a one-shot, don't TPK players for doing reasonable things or overreacting out of fear, and above all do not use a game's mechanics to punish players for taking actions in any scenario. Forget Me Not makes it all too easy for a bad Keeper to destroy the party, and tank the game night with it, unless that's what every player is up for in this particular game. In my experience, even with CoC, most players just are not.
Now again, these are nitpicks, and the style and tone of the game just isn't one I personally favor. Nothing wrong with that, in fact I had a blast playing it. Make no mistake, the positives far outweigh the negatives here. I loved this scenario, as nightmarish as it was for me, and for how much it terrified the absolute shit out of me. It's a scenario most any Keeper could run easily, but depending how hardcore and ruthless they are it can easily become a slaughterfest. This can be a very hard scenario to win, make no bones about it, but this again greatly depends on the Keeper and the party, and it's hardly the scenario's fault it's got a penchant for murdering characters. Hell, MoN murders characters left, right, and center, and nobody hates it for that. Forget Me Not is the same way, and a lovely little nightmare of a gem. I'd even say it's one of the best scenarios in the entire supplement, and a must-run for any Keeper who has experienced players. Trust me when I say it's not an experience to be missed, nor is it one your players are likely to forget any time soon. 9.5 out of 10 Hungry Broodlings of Eihort for this scenario. It's easily one of my favorites, and would have ranked higher if not for the small quibbles I had with it.