My group plays mostly Call of Cthulhu in various incarnations (20s CoC, Delta Green, Cthulhu Invictus), so we're quite experienced, and we like the investigative part. We started playing MoN around five years ago, and got to Egypt. As written, it's quite hard. We never moved on (Pandemic, etc.). I was a player in the campaign.
My friend and I take turns GMing (separate campaigns, not a single campaign), and I like the idea of one day trying to run MoN. I just finished a campaign set around Vladivostok during the Russian Civil War, that I've run over the course of three years (GM'ing about half of our playing sessions over that time, about 3-4 hours per week), and I've planted some seeds that made the players go, "ho ho ho, are you planning to run MoN on us one day". I've used Jackson Elias as an NPC (he's there to do research for one of his books, and he's been of assistance to the PCs in their adventures), an appearance by Bradley Grey, and some references to the Carlyle family (one of the players developed a New York socialite background for his character, and I threw in familiarity with the Carlyle family). I've planted a contact with an Imperial Japanese Navy officer that would be their NPC contact in the last parts of MoN, and some other namedropping.
My hope is to move on to a heavily customised mixture of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and Day of the Beast, with some elements of those campaigns already included as asides in the Vladivostok campaign. Provided at least part of the investigators survive that, and if we're all still alive and playing by then, I might give MoN a shot, with, by then, veteran investigators who already have ties to some of the seeds of MoN. Not sure if we'll ever make it that far, but I can but hope.
As a player in MoN, I agree that there seems to be a requirement for a lot of firepower; our GM has considered that, too. Our Investigators were not necessarily the best fighters, so the GM allowed us opportunities to hire additional muscle (for that, he stipulated that he wanted one of the PCs to be a rich New Yorker, both to have access to finance, and to have an initial link with the Carlyles). Our GM also used a system of "spoof points", where, as part of the adventure, we got spoof points as a reward, which we could use to re-roll a particularly critical die roll. That did help with survival rates.
