For those that may not know, Call of Cthulhu is a TTRPG game, a quite old one, the first edition being from 1981 but relatively new to me.
I discovered it through Mystery Quest one of those YouTube channels I always go into when I need a nice long entertaining background content while I do mini painting or try to draw something.
I found an interesting one-shot named Forget Me Not from "The things we leave behind" a compendium of 6 stories inspired by the Cthulhu system.
Forget Me Not is the story of some investigators who find themselves in a crashed car without a memory of who they are or how they got there. The story walks the investigators through learning the answers and discovering the dark truth of what happened.
I loved the setting of Cthulhu in general but this story in particular. I love how is a break from normal TRPG where everyone is trying to be the best hero possible to save the day, while here everyone is just trying to survive and understand enough to keep themselves alive without knowing too much to go crazy.
Is not easy to find a system that can make dying exciting and fun, where players can lose control of their investigators and still love role-playing going slowly mad.
Of course, we had to give the story a try, and some friends and my wife joined on a weekend to play it. I don't DM often, I think I have only done it once or twice, so I was a bit afraid I wouldn't make it fun enough, or that people would die too often because of my poor management and take the fun out of it.
Luckily I found it easy to DM the story, I watched Mystery Quest playthrough once, read the story, and took some notes on a new Obsidian vault.
From there I let the players do their thing and tried to drive them through it giving them enough hints and providing them with enough phobias to keep them on their toes at all times.
In the end, I managed to plant the seed of distrust on them well enough that they were never very sure if the town sheriff could be trusted or was an inept Sherif (the latter), I managed to bring new NPCs as they moved the story in directions I wasn't expecting.
Sadly for me (but amazing for them) they had 2 madness situations where they managed to restrain their friends quickly enough so it wouldn't do too much harm.
Overall, I enjoyed this game and system a lot. I may try a different adventure in the future. I also had fun DM'ing which I wasn't expecting!