Four Decks and a Dare: The Making of Last Call in Arkham

In less than a month Last Call in Arkham will be in your hands, and I can’t wait to share it with you.  It’s been a wild road getting here, so I thought I’d take you behind the curtain and walk through how this strange little project came to be.

Last Christmas, my good friend Brian, a historian, long-time gamer, and fan of all things eldritch, received no less than four Lovecraftian-themed playing card decks – and that was just from my household.  Ok, so we need better gift coordination at my house, but because I had just published The Sylvan, Brian challenged me to make him a game that made use of those cards.

His conditions:

• It had to be a solo journaling RPG.

• It had to use a deck of cards.

• It had to include Miskatonic U.

• The drunker you got, the less the horrors bothered you.

• And the bonus twist: cocktail recipes with eldritch horror names.

Now, he may have been joking, but puzzles like this make my brain light up.

My earliest notes were just pages of questions: What can a deck of cards do?  What causes horror in this game?  How do I make “drinks reduce dread” a game mechanic?  At one point I even considered making it a hexcrawl.

After about a month of noodling and scribbling, I had a rough framework.  Then came months of playtesting and refinement.  Drunkenness vs Dread evolved into a slider that gave boons or penalties.  The map was built, revised, and rebuilt again.  A clock mechanic came in, went out, and came back in a better form.  This is always the pattern for me: start big and messy, then ruthlessly trim until everything in the game has a purpose.

Once the core of the game was solid, I turned to the journaling piece.  Arkham has been written and re-written by so many authors over the years and each one has become a sort of tour guide, adding their own crooked streets and strange shadows, so I leaned into that.  The journaling prompts became the guidebook to my vision of Arkham.  As your after-party staggers from neighborhood to neighborhood, the prompts and encounters shape the tale you write.

Brian loves Hastur and The King in Yellow, so that felt like the obvious choice for the BBEG.  Chambers’ idea of a performance that devours the minds of its audience was the perfect hook, and so the premise of the game became "an ambitious college theater troupe putting on the one play no one should ever stage".

The drink challenge was the most fun of all. I set the game in 1935, two years after Prohibition, when cocktail culture in the U.S. was roaring back to life.  I leaned on my friend and bartending devotee Billyfish to help me choose historical drinks for the neighborhoods of Arkham.  Harry Craddock’s 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book became an important resource not only for technique but also aesthetic.  While I’m not much of a drinker myself, I love a good mocktail, so each neighborhood also has a Temperance-friendly option.  No matter what your preference is, there’s always something to sip in Arkham.

Here’s one such beverage from Casal’s Roadhouse out in the Arkham Wood:

TWILIGHT MIRAGE

• 1 can coconut milk

• Juice of 3 to 4 limes (to taste)

• sweetened condensed milk (to taste - ½ can if you like it sweet)

• Pinch of salt

Blend all ingredients until smooth. In a shaker, combine ice and 2 or 3 slices of lime.  Ladle in a couple scoops of the coconut mixture and shake.  Pour over fresh ice in a highball glass and garnish with a lime wedge.

Last Call in Arkham launches December 21 on Scrap Yarn Games and Itch.io.  When the curtain falls and the after-party starts, I can’t wait to hear where the night on the town takes you.