For those of you poor souls who have deigned to Favorite this train wreck of a man…

Sorry for the notification spam, i’m going through and collecting some OLD ass art I did that for some reason was never uploaded here. Also maybe some Picrews, idk, I’m rotating him in my mind of late.

At a glance:

Eugene is a lifelong but now mostly-reformed swindler. Partly because stepping away was the right thing to do and he's a more well-adjusted person now, and partly because it simply isn't an efficient or sufficient use of his time and effort anymore. He's still a showman and a salesman at heart, and still can't shake a certain greasy quality. Somewhat fussy and vain. He's a clever man, even brilliant, but foolish. Faked it til he made it as a wizard, capable of 8th level magic, and growing a little more honest allowed him to unlock a latent magic from his own way with words. A lot of his power though comes from the magic items he's picked up along the way, but that's hardly cheating. He was granted the title Earl of Bainhurst as a result of his participation in his adventuring party.

Personal details:

Appearance

Your garden variety Eugene is a vibrantly and lavishly dressed young man. Slicked-back hair, twirly mustache and neatly clipped beard. Atrocious wizard hat with way too many things piled onto it.

With brown hair, eyes of a sort of nondescript blue, average height, and handsomely pointed but not overly striking features, if he drops his usual trappings it is easy for him to disappear into a crowd. With the trappings, he's unmistakable.

Among this, there are some distinct eras to his appearance.

His conman and early adventuring era has him trending towards outfits that tried to signal "professional wizard", but also have a distinct "used car salesman" feeling. Flashy suitlike robes and a plethora of trinkets, bottles, and sellable trappings strapped onto too many belts and bandoliers. He tended to dye his hair more dramatic colors, often favoring black. In his earliest days, he had fluffy hair and clean-shaven face, but despite having an extremely trustworthy visage, it was too youthful to take very seriously, and the infamous facial hair has stayed ever since. 

As he grew more confident in his own capability, he lost the belts of knickknacks and started dressing to signal a more casual danger and power, leaning into a more rakish streetmage look. Something that tells you he is quite confident, thank you, especially with a sword.

At the end of his adventuring career, again, the vibe changes. He's been growing his hair out, letting a little freedom and curl return to it, and dressing in a way that he believes signals "I'm an important member of the aristocracy, I am a powerful and established wizard, and I am much more queer and eccentric than you could ever hope to be."

If you wish to draw Eugene:

You are welcome to pick any outfit, or invent one that suits a particular era's appearance. The feathers on the wizard hat aren't firmly established, and don't really matter except for the single black raven feather from the reunion with his sister.

Personality

Eugene is intensely extroverted, he loves interacting with or simply being in the same space as other people, which made it way too easy for him to fall down the path of confidence scams. He adores attention, being celebrated, wanted. It's hard to make him harbor ill-will towards someone else, and generally wishes others well. His life as a criminal forced him to create a sense of emotional disconnect from others to alleviate the cognitive dissonance, and he is still working through that issue. People he truly cares about are rare, and people he believes or allows to truly know him without his public persona are rarer.

Despite all his cleverness, he has a foolish quality, and the sort of personality that would want to believe the kinds of lies he tells. He is his own perfect mark.

He has a personal weakness for fine, extravagant, and indulgent things, you could easily call him a hedonist, and without some external force moderating his wallet, he will inevitably drive himself broke chasing after them. He will try anything once, to see if it's for him, or if only to be able to brag that he did so. 

He lives deeply in the present moment, and can be very susceptible to its emotional sway. If he is ever under-stimulated, he withers into a listless funk. But in turn he is very difficult to overwhelm.

Magical Powers

Eugene, after some time with his adventuring party, after years of failed attempts, finally picked up some real magic. First, the self-taught attempts of the Arcane Trickster, having watched his partymembers cast and picking up what he could. Next, wizardry, as taught by an undead, incorporeal squid, and then later more classically trained peers. Finally, the effortless magic of words with gravity, bardic magic, once he finally let go of most of the meaningless torrent of lies. 

He is now an extremely powerful and capable mage, the only magic out of his reach being that of the 9th level. While he may be capable of understanding it, with +18 to Arcana and +6 to INT, his body, past a certain point, simply cannot handle being used as a conduit for something that powerful. 

His casting style of a bizarre hodgepodge of every caster he has ever seen in action, plus some tricks of his own. Having learned from bards, sorcerers, rangers, clerics, mind flayer liches, and sometimes even actual wizards, his approach is neither orthodox nor intuitive to anyone familiar with academic wizardry. There's a lot of intuition, spacebar heating, and "eh, close enough".

Abberant Powers

Eugene was, for a time, possessed by an alhoon, the mind flayer equivalent of a lich. This mind flayer made itself at home in his body, including making alterations to his brain that remained even after Eugene's control was restored. He is now innately telepathic out to 30', can levitate for a brief period each day, and can read minds briefly each day if he chooses. Even if he doesn't choose, he still has a low level constant ambient empathic ability (expressed as Expertise in Insight). He pings as an aberration to spells and class features that detect such creatures.

Earldom

For services rendered to his home country during his adventures, he was granted a portion of land. This was set aside by the emperor to split amid the entire party, but everyone turned down their portion and requested other favors, leaving him with everything, and the title of Earl of Bainhurst.

Bainhurst is approximately 4000 acres of hilly, wooded, and uninhabited land. Eugene has begun digging out a home here, alongside his tentative slowburn partner & noted sad goth elf Rothwin, and begun to pull together people (usually through extravagantly sponsoring anyone interesting with a useful skillset, who wishes to move in) who can begin to create a self sufficient little village.

Magic Items:

Eugene has, throughout his adventures, picked up several magic items that are now indispensable, and he is rarely seen without.

Boots of Haste

His earliest still-owned prize. Taken from a highwaywoman in the Gulch that the party hunted to pay off some of their debts, these allow him a once-daily use of a dumbed down version (no bonus to AC or DEX saves) of the Haste spell. 

Hat of Wizardry

Found in an Alhoon's lair in Barovia, this for a time let him cast a free cantrip from anything on the Wizard spell list, which he used his broken Arcana modifier to abuse, until it was replaced by the Mizzium Apparatus. Despite being de-attuned to the hat, he still wears it.

Mizzium Apparatus

An experimental prototype from Rothwin's father's antimagic cult. It was meant to be a combat machine meant to resist magic. Turns it, it boosted magic instead, but it was too expensive to destroy. Eugene rescued it from languishing in a closet, and uses his broken arcana modifier to access the entire Wizard spell list up to 4th level, and Bard list to 2nd. 

He later upgraded this to become a more lightweight and fashionable item, something between a waistcoat and a corset, and gave it illusory properties that he can change its appearance, or hide it entirely.

Even later, it was upgraded to be able to cast any spell he has a slot for and is on his spell lists. It still cannot upcast, though.

Ioun Stone of Intellect

This, in combination with a Tome of Clear Thought, brings his INT to 22, also known as +6. It's a small marbled stone that orbits around his head. He usually keeps this active, though has been known to take it off if he wants to let down, let loose, or simply is in the mood not to think about things at the end of a long day.

Familiars & Pets & Lackeys:

Cornelius

Cornelius is Eugene's familiar, a fiend summoned in the form of a screech owl, in a symptom of Eugene's chronic inability to know what sizes birds are supposed to come in.

He is a stern and judgey creature, but resigned to his fate serving the beck and call of this bizarre little man.

Snowy

"Snowy" is a Simulacrum of Eugene, created by himself in a ferver of a 14 hour work day. Snowy's purpose is to help Eugene overachieve, or, more commonly, to do all those things that Eugene himself is capable of but does not feel like doing, with no real thought that the simulacrum doesn't want to be doing these things either.

Although he is by nature of the Simulacrum spell friendly and obedient towards his creator, he is still as petty as Eugene would be in such a situation, and will often make passive-aggressive digs at him, quietly considering him to be a stuck up shirking little bastard.

He does not eat or drink, to his own personal dismay.

You can tell them apart due to the fact that Snowy doesn't get hat rights, and, eventually, the fact that he does not age.

Got a little melted when magic broke for like a minute, and is now acting a bit drunk. Unsure if he is fixable.

Marigold

Marigold is Eugene's... dog. When he started stepping into his role as an Earl, after the events of his main campaign, he decided it would suit him well to tromp around the grounds with a dog at his heels, and somehow, he came up with Marigold. She is most likely some form of Blink Dog hybrid, looking much like a retriever, except with pointed ears and tufted tail, and a few spikes hidden in her fur, and the tendency to appear in places that would be otherwise impossible for a normal dog to reach. No one has the heart to tell him this isn't a normal dog, and he hasn't seemed to notice.

Story:

Pre-campaign