The next star in our gallery of rogues is The ShapeShifter, an entity that manifests itself as multiple personalities across Carny Island.

In Game 1, Crookwood, The Shift’a appears as Uncle Shrift, the mortician and closet cannibal; Moggy, or The Moggster, a clown inside a Jack-in-the-Box; and The Claw, a serial-killing hand puppet.

The challenge in a narrative-based game like Carny is how to refresh the star. I wanted to keep the same voice and personality—mean and nasty—and build on it while changing the face. That means I can introduce new characters for each new level without having to recast the role.

The ShapeShifter provides the perfect vehicle. It can change shape and take on any form.

Crookwood is packed with ghosts, but ghosts are not necessarily evil. We don’t get many actual visitations from true evil.

BooBahBashBah—the Boo—is different. The Boo is a truly evil entity. It is a ShapeShifter that has possessed old Uncle Shrift and now manifests as him.

Shrift doesn’t know he is a manifestation of The Shift’a. Not that it matters. When he’s himself, he’s himself—and when he’s not, he doesn’t know anyway.

The possession explains Shrift’s slow slide into fuckedom.

JuJu is a force created by bad deeds. It belongs to the Boo in much the same way that a dark mood belongs to whoever is having one. That is all we need to say about JuJu here.

When manifested as Uncle Shrift, The Shift’a presents as a green ogre: a functioning alcoholic and closet cannibal who runs Crookwood’s mortuary, funeral home and crematorium.

Before he became Crookwood’s mortician, Shrift was a shrink. He studied psychiatry at the **I.M.

Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University**, graduating with a red diploma with honours.

Shrift offers to interview any player in advance to create an advanced psychological profile—which will obviously be used against them.

His name comes from “short shrift”: the brief opportunity condemned prisoners were given to confess their sins before execution.

Shrift is both shifty and thrifty.

Shrift first tasted human meat when he ate his own mother, the serial killer Cybil Munt.

Cybil died in a shoot-out with police after murdering dozens of beauty queens by spiking the punch at pageants with ratkill. Police release remains to the next of kin, and Shrift was next in line.

Given the body, Shrift—shrifty by nature—ate his mum’s heart and acquired the taste.

There is no more shameful crime than eating your own mother. It puts a new spin on Mum’s home cooking.

Shrift stashed what remained of old Munt in a plywood box on the other side of the Gates of Hell, down at the back of the Crookwood basement.

Naturally, the body caused quite a stink. The stink summoned BooBahBashBah and its raspers, and the whole place went to shit—with hauntings and other evil doings.

Raspers are eyeball-sucking flying rodents. They guard the tunnel leading to the Gates of Hell in Crookwood’s basement.

That tunnel is where The Villain takes its Stein for a test drive.

A Stein is the monster the player assembles from body parts stolen from graves.

Building it and getting it over the Gates is how you “win” Crookwood.

If a Stein makes it over the Gates of Hell, Shrift’s crime of eating his own mother could be exposed.

That gives Shrift a very personal interest in the outcome. He hosts and umpires the game, injects commentary on his kills and advises The Villain on which graves to rob—or not rob. At the same time, he has to prevent the player from uncovering what he hid beyond the Gates.

Shrift saves money wherever he can.

Seeing an opportunity in Crookwood’s crematorium, he put the unused furnaces to work baking meat pizzas. The crematorium now doubles as a takeaway pizza joint.

Shrift is prone to breaking out in gaping, bleeding wounds.

He robs corpses in the morgue and carries their vital parts back to his cottage, high on the Bulge.

He is a great cook and hosts many dinner parties. His Beef Wellington is to die for.

The dogs don’t know they’re eating the remains of humans.

The ghosts of the humans being eaten do know—and hang around Shrift’s cottage as poltergeists.

They make their displeasure known by moving furniture up the walls and hurling it across rooms. Shrift lives among the furious ghosts of his half-eaten dinner guests.

Shrift is a functioning alcoholic who drinks 150% proof BLACK DOG whisky.

He drinks according to the phases of the moon, reaching full-tilt raging drunk by the time it is full. He then swears off the drink for a few days before climbing back on the proverbial wagon.

His drunken rages add dangerous unpredictability to the game. You want to avoid playing Carny Island on a full moon because that is when Shrift is going off.

Empty bottles of Black Dog rain down on the graveyard. He rolls more than one grenade down the pipes.

He becomes nastier, more dangerous and less predictable.

The Tunnel of Looove, the Crookwood yard and basement, and even the Howling Forest are littered with shards of glass from broken Black Dog bottles tossed from the balcony of his cottage.

Shrift is often glimpsed performing for cameras. His appearances are beamed onto billboards throughout Crookwood.

It is a mixture of Hollywood and cheap theme-park special effects.

Carny Island is caught somewhere in the middle of a warped reality.

A film set that’s been possessed.

Shrift is the host and umpire, but he is also part of the show. He comments on his kills, interferes with the player and stages his own appearances while something much older and darker works through him.

Moggy was once a real person.

He ran away from home to join Carny Island and found work as one of its spruikers. Now possessed by BooBahBashBah, he appears as The Moggster: a clown inside a Jack-in-the-Box with a light bulb that pulsates according to his mood.

Moggy and Shrift can exist simultaneously. So can The Claw.

This isn’t a simple costume change where one character disappears before the next arrives. The manifestations can occupy Crookwood together.

The Claw is a serial-killing hand puppet.

It helps stock the graveyard with fresh kills from the retirement village down the road.

Those new arrivals give The Villain more graves to rob and Shrift more bodies to interfere with.

Shrift, Moggy and The Claw form Crookwood’s principal gallery of rogues, but this Magazine is mainly about the old ogre pulling faces in front of the camera.

I did the voice for Shrift.

I recorded an hour of content and uploaded it to ElevenLabs as a clone. I then worked with Codex to refine the Russian accent, the age of the voice and the mood.

Over the past few years, I’ve drawn Shrift in hundreds of layers, including all the Adobe mouth guides.

We have also created a Shrift BOT for the website. It answers frequently asked questions in the style an ogre would be expected to respond.

While Shrift is a technological moron, the character has a vague idea that he has been recreated by artificial intelligence. He understands where we are and knows Carny isn’t set in the Middle Ages.

The amusement park dates from the seventies, but the game isn’t afraid to confront the issues of the day.

The ShapeShifter is found in almost every culture’s mythology: a creature or person able to undergo a drastic change in appearance, sometimes at will and sometimes under specific conditions such as a moon phase, ritual or curse.

There is also the alien version, which suggests that visiting aliens manifested themselves as lizard people.

For Carny Island, The ShapeShifter gives me a way to carry the same malignant star from one game to another. The voice and personality can remain mean and nasty while the face, body and setting change.

Later editions can reveal other manifestations of The Shift’a.

For now, Crookwood belongs to Uncle Shrift—and, just behind him, Moggy.