Review of the Call of Cthulhu scenario Forget Me Not, written by Brian M. Sammons, for Stygian Fox’s modern day scenario anthology, The Things We Leave Behind, published in 2016.
In-Short: A scenario with an incredibly strong opening half and an unfortunately underdeveloped tailing half, but overall held up by its nasty and memorable premise.
Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers:
Among the non-Chaosium published scenario-centric supplements for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, Stygian Fox’s The Things We Leave Behind and Fear’s Sharp Little Needles are two of the most well known. When the first one is mentioned, it is overwhelmingly associated with the first two scenarios; Jeff Moer’s Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home, or the subject of this review, veteran Call of Cthulhu writer/editor Brian M. Sammons’ Forget Me Not, often showing up when someone asks for a particularly nasty scenario.
Not to bury the lede; it does largely justify its praise, and is indeed quite nasty, though both not as nasty as it could be and occasionally nastier than it really needs to be. It also clearly suffers from a lack of editing. It leans hard into the kind-of-embarrassing ‘FOR MATURE GAMERS’ ribbon across the cover of the book, and mostly to good effect, with some of its imagery sticking in my groups’ minds long after we played. I do feel many 7th edition Chaosium-published scenarios pull their punches, in a way that Stygian Fox’s The Things We Leave Behind and Fear’s Sharp Little Needles very much do not. Though while Scott Dorward’s Unland and Matthew Sanderson’s Dissociation from Fear’s Sharp Little Needles similarly stick in my group’s collective mind and still get brought up, Forget Me Not occasionally trips over ‘nasty’ and lands in a very early 2010s ‘edgy for the sake of being edgy’ that comes across as a bit silly, if still fun (or in one very unnecessary case, legitimately shitty and could be easily excised).
This is partly due to Sammons’ writing style being much more casual than is common for modern CoC scenarios. In general, I find this quite refreshing, and makes reading the colourful text more enjoyable than a technical-writing-style module. The two downsides are that 1) it can make the already quite long text-chunks feel overwritten, and 2) it comes across as occasionally overindulgent when describing some of the grodier scenes.
The scenario covers 24 black-and-white pages of dense, two column text, with the occasional boxed text, handout, map, or art insert to spice things up. There are no pregens included, despite the scenario heavily leaning into a defined group of characters. Handouts mostly take the form of newspaper articles. The maps by Stephanie McAlea are simple but perfectly usable, while the art by Davide Como and McAlea vary between nicely moody or a bit stiff. Art is obviously subjective, but I don’t jive with something about the art style, it’s a bit murky and looks almost like it’s 3D modeled in places. The PDF has no indexed table of contents or hyperlinks, and the physical version is print on demand (maybe there was a proper print run for the initial kickstarter? I don’t know, for now there’s just the POD version, meaning it’s easy to obtain, but the paper quality is what it is). The play time varies wildly, and I’ve seen people mention as short as 4 hours and up to 20. I feel the sweet spot is 6 to 12, depending on what kind of pacing you like or the time constraints you’re dealing with.
Forget Me Not’s largest issues are editing and an underdeveloped tail end. Being published in 2016, The Things We Left Behind came out the same year the physical 7th edition book came out, and two years after the first digital release. It seems likely the scenario was originally written for 6th edition before being touched up for 7th, as stats and rules from 6th edition awkwardly crop up alongside 7th edition stats and rules. The lopsided structure may also be a bit of an editing issue, with the setup and investigation taking up 18 pages, with the later chunk of the scenario only covering 6 pages, and two and half of those are covered with maps or art inserts, and the actual proper ending gets a whopping paragraph. While it does make sense that a good portion of the text for a freeform scenario would be devoted to set up, the lack of support for what to do after the investigators have learned all there is to learn is still jarring compared to how thorough the rest of the text is.
But what a set up! Much of what I’ve written in this spoiler-lite section is quite negative, but that’s because the best parts all need to be discovered by the players. I really do have to emphasise that this is still one of my most memorable runs of CoC. It’s intense, visceral, and all manner of other buzzwords, but it does earn them. It has issues, but even if it’s more work for the Keeper than it really needs to be, watching the players work out what the hell is going on is absolutely wonderful. Highly recommended.
Forget Me Not can found in Stygian Fox’s The Things We Leave Behind, available on DriveThruRPG in print or pdf.
Forget Me Not combines three story/scenario hooks into something much more than the sum of its parts. It has an amnesia set up, not at all uncommon for scenarios, as well as a ‘find the cure’ for a sickness/curse sort of goal, along with a ‘deal with the devil’ theme, but with the twist that the ‘deal with the devil’ between the investigators and ‘the devil,’ in this case the Great Old One Eihort, occurred before the start of the scenario. With the investigators starting amnesiatic, they need to remember what happened so they understand, and ideally cure, whatever horribly affliction is slowly killing them. A very, very neat set up.
The scenario assumes the investigators are members of a ghost-hunting TV show that were lured into contact with Eihort by a dastardly sorcerer disguised as a realtor showing off a supposedly haunted house. Cowering before Eihort, the investigators struck a deal to take the Great Old One’s brood into themselves in exchange for not getting squished, then their memories were wiped before being released. The brood will erupt and kill them in… an amount of time (more on that in a bit), but they won’t realise that until they start seeing bugs occasionally crawling out of them in various disgusting ways.
Players are also asked to make some rolls before the game start, not knowing those will be used to determine their SAN loss from the meeting with the deity. They eventually suffer those predetermined SAN losses as their memories return, meaning they may already be suffering indefinite insanity or face a coming bout of madness. I really liked this, and it’s a lot of fun to see the players’ unease making a bunch of unexplained rolls before they even get their investigator sheets.
And speaking of investigator sheets, a fun way to play up the amnesia is to only slowly give out their sheets, starting just with their characteristics, then little by little roll out their skills as they use them and their names and backstories as they uncover them. This requires some extra work, such as preparing multiple investigator sheets missing information, but the simplest way would be to give the players blank sheets and having them fill everything in as they learn it. A fun initial handout (which can be found online) can be company badges with pictures and names the investigators find scattered in the van they start in.
The initial investigation is focused on finding out who the investigators even are, then what they were doing and what happened to them. This takes up the vast majority of the text, as well as most likely the majority of the play time (though that is extremely variable). There are plenty of ways to go about figuring things out, and the scenario text does an admirable job of laying out the numerous routes the investigators might take to retrace their steps, learning both what happened to them and the background mystery. From the first words of the opening scene to whenever the players finally get the last piece of the memories back is a wonderful ride, and quite easy to run despite the freeform nature of the scenario.
It’s also very gross and uncomfortable in a quite effective way (minus one part, more on that in the next paragraph). This does mean the Keeper should be upfront with their players or at least know them extremely well, as the infection, down to the physical and emotional descriptions of it, is very obviously a mythos-y metaphor for sexual assault. This can be powerful if handled well, but if players aren’t ready for it or caught blind sided it could be distressing. The initial sensations without any memories are legitimately creepy, the ramping up of the body horror side effects is appropriately nasty, and the dreams hinting at what occurred ramp up the dread.
There is one brief instance where the darkness falls directly into gross edginess for little to no reason. In an entirely Keeper-facing bit of background information that is explicitly written to be unknowable to the investigators is a description of actual sexual assault against a teenager. It’s weird and gives no actionable information for the Keeper or players, it seems to just be there to make the Keeper feel bad. The vague argument could be ‘bad things happen in real life,’ which, sure, but if the scenario text is going to feature a real life horror, then at least make it meaningful and weightful. Here, its passing inclusion only makes the crime seem weightless when it should be the exact opposite.
Where the scenario wobbles a bit for me is after the investigation is finished. Once the investigators know everything, they’ll likely want to go after the evil wizard realtor and cure their curse. And that’s more or less what the scenario text tells the Keeper. With everything going on up until then, the scenario suddenly feels static despite being even more freeform now. The baddies don’t have any further plans, and the brood infection doesn’t actually progress until the Keeper wills it.
(Sidenote on the brood infection: as the scenario points out, the spell itself takes an absurd 1D100 months to kill its victim. The text suggests hurrying that up, but otherwise gives no mechanical suggestions, and goes the other way saying that the fate of the investigators (and story) shouldn’t come down to a roll. Balls to that, I say (very respectfully), as it robs the players (and investigators) of a ticking clock. I instead have the investigators permanently lose 1D10 CON every 6 hours, bursting like a ripe melon once they reach 0 CON. After two or three CON losses, the players should be able to gauge the rate of loss and figure out how much time they have. This obviously is variable depending on how long you want the scenario to last.)
And weirdly, it’s not all that difficult to solve the main two issues, but once they do, the scenario doesn’t really have a proper ending point. The evil wizard is hardy and takes minimal damage, except from fire or explosives, which investigators will probably figure out soon enough, and she is reluctant to kill the investigators as harming Eihort’s brood makes the old bugger a little upset. Once the investigators get her spooky mythos tome, (or just go find one at a university library) a fairly simple spell completely removes the infection. There is an HP loss corresponding to how long the infection had been present, which could potentially be lethal, but the scenario tends to not last much longer than a day or two. One MASSIVE downside to removing the infection is a, quote, ‘10% cumulative chance of causing Eihort to appear to wreak its vengeance,’ and that is the extent of the text devoted to that eventuality. I’m bad at math, but if you have 4 players, 10%+20%+30%+40% (that is what cumulative means, no?) is a pretty good chance of summoning the old bastard, but the scenario then gives zero suggestions of what to do with that. Does the god immediately show up in the middle of wherever the investigators are? Does it just kill the investigators then bugger off? What about witnesses? It seems odd that the main solution to the scenario’s main issue is very likely to result in the investigators’ immediate deaths via god, without any actual text devoted to pondering what that entails.
One last bit of weirdness is with some of the Mythos skill-giving dreams the investigators suffer. I find these end up being more confusing, serving up red herrings that the players really don’t need to deal with given how confusing the situation is at the start, as the Mythos entities they witness have absolutely nothing to do with Eihort or its brood. They also can grant powerful spells that could completely derail the scenario (see the How We Roll actual play of Forget Me Not for an example of a glorious derailment thanks to one of those dreams). I just removed those and only had the weird metaphorical dreams and, if I had needed them, memory fragments if the players hadn’t learned everything yet.
To deal with the limp ending, and reinforce the themes I like most about the scenario, I make a few tweaks. These definitely won’t work for everyone as they make the scenario quite bleak and shorter than some might want. First, I make the brood infection work as I mentioned before, acting much faster, predictable, and inevitable, with no CON or similar rolls to avoid its effects. Second, I make the evil wizard actively stalk the party. At first they don’t recognise her, but with sharp eyes might realise some lady is frequently watching them. Once they realise who she is, she will ideally also realise her cover is blown, and take quick action, either attacking the party, OR, if they befriended any NPCs, take an NPC or two hostage, setting up some conflict. Third, I remove the ability to cure the brood infection. The investigators are absolutely doomed, with the exception of accepting Eihort’s possible offer to become its new prophet, but this can only apply to one investigator. I am well aware some players, and many Keepers, do not like completely forcing death on the player characters, but for a one shot like this, I think there is good roleplay value in realising, then dealing with, the knowledge that your investigator is doomed a horrible death, and playing out how they face that end. Do they go out in a blaze of glory, taking out the sorcerer and even trying to confront an immortal god? Do they deny the inevitable and struggle to find a cure right up until they explode in a wave of bugs? Do they end things on their own terms? Do they freeze up until their terrible demise? Or do they make another deal with the devil?
Removing the ‘Balk Brood’ spell also changes the sorcerer’s character a bit. I like to have her backstory be the same as written initially, with her taking Eihort’s deal thinking she can duck out whenever she needs to, but later she realized the spell she thought would be her get-out-of-jail-free card wasn’t real, and she had damned herself to a life of servitude before an inevitable and horrific death. Knowing she has no escape, she takes a more active role in the scenario, rather than just letting the investigators come to her.
Forget Me Not is an amazing but extremely uneven scenario. It feels either unfinished, or brutally constrained by a page limit, and with some awkward nubbings that feel like they should have been shaved off along with the editing mishaps. It’s just on the last step of being a nearly perfect scenario, making the issues holding it back stand out more than they otherwise would have in a lesser scenario. Still, if the Keeper is willing to put in some work, and the players are up for a nasty time, Forget Me Not is one of the scenarios that could stick with a group for a long, long time.
Forget Me Not can found in Stygian Fox’s The Things We Leave Behind, available on DriveThruRPG in print or pdf.
