Name: Chris Buckwood
Nicknames/alias: Buck
Age:39
Place of birth & ethnicity: Watkinsville, Georgia. White.
Gender: M
Occupation: Gambler and "merchant", conman.
Character appearance & personality
Appearance: Buck sticks out in a crowd, thats for sure. His skin has somehow stayed relatively pale. His build is tall, thin, and gangly. His arms and legs are long and he walks as if he is always about to topple over, even if he is quite coordinated.
His head is shaved bald, and his light blonde hair makes his eyebrows hard to see. He had a beard that starts at the top of his ears and covers his jaw and chin, sticking off and outwards, looking like the bottom of a broom. Is's light color makes it hard to see under certain lighting conditions. His face is his most prominent feature, with deep set, dark green eyes that are almost always overshadowed. His skin is pulled tight over his face, as if there wasn't enough to go around and he had to make do. His cheek bones and jaw are highly pronounced, making it almost cringe-worthy when he swivels and adjusts his jaw. It's almost skull-like, all of this results in a tight-lipped, hungry looking smile.
Clothing: A dark red suit made of cloth with white undershirt, as well as dark red pants and leather boots. Atop his shiny bald dome is a black bowler hat.
Personal style: Anything that looks classy.
Personality: Despite his ghastly appearance, Chris managed to make it work in his favor, his ugliness somehow making him appear more genuine. After all, with a face like that, what could he have to hide? Lots, actually. Buck has a passion for "earning" money. Easy marks, manipulation, and the rare fair deal are what composes his income. He's friendly enough, but it's almost always a front. He's arrogant and clever, with a dark, sometimes mocking, sense of humor.
Habits: There's a silver coin that he deftly flips through his fingers.
Regular life skills: Buck is a conman, through and through. He gets people to trust him just enough to take their money, then he's gone the next morning. His silver tongue is a big part of how he's managed to do what he does for so long. He's also somewhat of a botanist, just as a little hobby.
Combat skills: He's unusually flexible and speedy. Other than that, he's a cruddy shot, but he's good with a kinfe.
Items on your person: Fifty dollars, scattered about his person. He also has a gold-plated pocket watch, a deck of expensive looking playing cards and a boring looking Cattleman revolver. He also has several daggers hidden throughout his apparel, ready to pull out and stab anyone who gets grabby.
Additional stuff: A surprisingly well crafted fold-out cards table, some changes of clothing, extra cards, snake-oil products, and some extra small knives.
What brings you to Haylliesburg: These small town shmucks should be some easy marks. He's just passing through, looking to make some extra cash before moving onto a bigger city.
Your life before coming to Haylliesburg: He's lived the life of a nomad, hopping from settlement to settlement scamming hard-working folk of their money along the way with rigged gambling games and snake-oil products. It's not like he doesn't enjoy playing a fair and square poker game, it's just that he likes money more. This all started when he was younger, when his honest merchant father and mother got conned out of a living. After his parent's General Store closed, his father went into the mines and came back physically disabled, and his mother couldn't exactly find work, so it was up to Chris to try and make the family's money as a rare single child.
He was no good at hard labor, and he never had high education, so it seemed like he couldn't find a way of making money. That was until he realized he had a silver tongue and a sleight of hand. At first, he went into the saloons and attempted to get really good at games like Texas Hold 'Em Poker, Blackjack, and Liar's Dice. He got so good he could read people like a book, and while most players attempt to hide all emotions when they play poker, Chris spouts bullshit the whole game. After a few hands he could read his opponents like a book.
Even still, he wasn't making enough cash, so he decided to rig the odds in his favor. Slipping weighted die into cups, needed cards into hands, and sometimes even more creative ways of cheating (or positive outcome security, as Buck sometimes calls it) had him begin raking in the cash.
Soon, it was no longer just about taking care of his aging parents, but about the sport of it all. He loved it. Then he thought he should throw in just a little more variety into his income, and began selling "snake-oil" products. Miracle substances and cures that can apparently solve all of live's problems in a single use. It was tough work at first, but he got the hang of it and began peddling useless goods to common folk who didn't know any better.
First, it was things like "Buckwood's Miracle Cure; Polio be-gone!" but that didn't work because they would go and try it out on a sick individual and find out his fraud right away. Then, it was things like Miracle Bait or Insta-Grow, things that hunters and farmers would have to go out into the fields and try out before they discovered they'd been had, and by then Buckwood would be out of town.
His parents eventually passed away, but Buckwood had found his calling.
Eventually, he ran into some people who were more perceptive than the others, and even worse, people who were perceptive AND angry. That's why he carries around several hidden knives in various useful places on his person. His sleight of hand can have it so a person can be on the floor with a knife in their leg before they even realize Buckwood's got out of his chair.
And so, for the last decade, he's been wandering the developing west, pulling scams and cheating people out of their hard-earned money. Even if he get's shot, he'll die doing what he loves.
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