Eric tends to suffer a lot from the elder child syndrome without actually being the eldest. With this comes a tendency to want to take charge of a situation, so from one perspective that makes him incredibly bossy, and yet from another, a natural born leader depending on your bias. He does have a very good innate grasp of the proper order of things and people, but is perhaps a little frustrated when he cannot make people understand what he knows to be true. What makes it worse is that he is usually right. Eric is very self-possessed and confident, if a little bit self-involved. This confidence is born of extremely hard work because although he is naturally talented in many areas, brilliance does not come as easily for him as for say, Bleys, or the flashes of brilliance that both Corwin and Brand often display without seeming to try. In some ways, this explains his flashes of rather caustic humor which have a tendency to display themselves when Eric, despite all his careful planning is caught off-guard. Of all the members of his family that he finds the most unpredictable and thus the hardest for him to predict and most likely to catch him off-guard in an unpleasant way, well, that dubious honor goes to Corwin.

Eric has the capacity to be very generous and very charming, like his Father. Like his Father also, he is very organized and knows how to lead people and influence them, though he is not a slave to his work. When he sets his mind on a goal he works towards it with a ruthless capacity until it is realized. Eric knows how to harness his own energy and ambition toward an objective goal and will be able to instill that in his child. Eric can also be very comforting and a source of security for any child because of his reliability and strength. For those younger children frequently around him, he can easily become a dashing role model. Although he plays the political game with the best of them in his family, he is known to be very sensitive around matters of legitimacy because of his own birth.




Eric encourages hard work and hands-on experience, not unlike Caine, but in contrast to Caine, he does not believe in taking short-cuts but in the sustaining force of doing things the hard but lasting way. With Eric as parent, the child receives an all-round education - which is implicitly understood by other Elders as parents - but with Eric it is his focus. He can be a bit over-protective especially in the case of any daughter, may be even overtly possessive. He'll teach his child to always protect themselves no matter what and instill his confidence in them regardless of the area they choose as their expertise. If a child catches him in one of his more self-involved moods when he's been drinking a bit more than he should, they may find themselves the target of that caustic wit and then in the next moment find themselves being privately lamented to about why the rest of his family does not hold him in greater regard or affection.