Professor Barnesworth is a broad-shouldered rock gnome with copper-brown hair, bright hazel eyes, and an extravagant pair of brass-rimmed spectacles balanced low on his nose. His scale mail has been carefully altered to fit his compact frame, with several mismatched but polished plates. He wears a blue guild apron over it, crowded with chalk marks, tiny screwdrivers, bits of wire, and labeled glass vials. Within a minute of meeting him, most people notice that he constantly adjusts his spectacles with one finger whenever he is thinking, even when they are already perfectly positioned.

Professor Barnesworth is enthusiastic, argumentative, and relentlessly curious. He treats every malfunction as an invitation to investigate and every stranger as a potential collaborator, rival, or student. He is generous with practical advice, but he cannot resist correcting imprecise terminology, especially when someone calls a mechanism magical without understanding how it works.

Professor Barnesworth was born above a clockmaker's shop in a gnome settlement where every household seemed to contain at least one ticking, whirring, or faintly smoking invention. His family expected him to become a respectable artisan, but Barnesworth became fascinated with the practical mysteries behind magic. He apprenticed under a patient guild engineer, learning to repair delicate mechanisms, identify arcane residues, and turn ordinary tools into instruments of remarkable utility. He earned the title Professor after giving a series of highly theatrical lectures on the subject of magical household improvements, including a self-stirring soup ladle that briefly achieved independent political opinions. His career changed when a guild expedition uncovered a damaged arcane device of unknown origin. Barnesworth helped stabilize it, but the device vanished before the guild could study it properly. Convinced that someone is collecting dangerous magical technology, he left his workshop to investigate. He travels with his tools, his lecture notes, and a stubborn belief that clever engineering should improve ordinary people's lives, not merely enrich powerful collectors. He is eager to prove that a gnome's greatest invention is not a machine, but a solution to a problem everyone else thought was impossible.