The Player
The
Skritch.
The player enters Crookwood as a 3' thief dressed in a skeleton suit. The Villain. A pest. A rodent.
Small enough to disappear
The Carnies who run Crookwood dress up in skeleton suits to scare the ghost-train riders, and The Villain thinks it will be able to blend in.
But at 3', everything towers above it.
The Villain is faceless. Sexless. It could be anybody from anywhere.
It moves
Creep.
Run.
Duck.
Look.
The Villain moves in short, deliberate bursts. A quick direction tap changes its facing. Holding the direction makes it travel.
Carny is a game of observation and stealth. The Villain creeps and sneaks around—hiding behind bushes or in the graves it is robbing during daylight hours.
It speaks
SKRITCH
The Villain speaks a private invented language called SKRITCH.
It talks constantly to itself: planning, worrying, arguing, snickering, singing nursery rhymes and working through the grave robbery aloud.
SKRITCH is a real, repeatable language rather than random gibberish. Words and phrases keep their meaning. Repetition, visible actions, props and recurring names allow players to decode it.
The audience must love The Villain before Carny kills it.Ectoplasm
It glows.
As it moves through the game, it picks up ectoplasm and gets electrified. It goes fluoro green and fuses with body parts.
The Villain's bones are a gauge. At full charge, it is self-illuminating—visible with no external light at all.
And the glow is a stealth cost, not a buff. Lit up in a dark graveyard, it is a beacon.
A body at a time
The Skritch becomes a Stein.
As it robs graves, The Villain's 17 bones are replaced by severed limbs. It plugs in vital organs. Hearts are plumbed into the suit. It can supercharge the Stein with bionic limbs.
But under the suit, The Villain is flesh and blood and bleeds. And blood in Crookwood rings the dinner bell.