My personal Rogues’ Gallery, where I blather on about some of my favorite characters from the many RPG’s I’ve been able to play.
Name: Tommy “Love Handles” McQueen
Game: Werewolf: The Apocalypse (2nd Edition)
Current Status: Unknown
Love Handles was great fun to play during an unfortunately short-lived Werewolf campaign I participated in at the FLGS I used to hang around as a young man. I want to say this was about mid-to-late ‘96 or so, but my memory of this period of time is shot all to hell, so I could be off by a year or so. Anyway, I definitely recall getting into Vampire: The Masquerade in 1995 with its 2nd edition book, and was slowly en route to discovering the other World of Darkness titles. I knew a great number of old-school inclined folk, guys I played AD&D with there, who hated, absolutely HATED anything that came out of White Wolf at the time. Possibly because WW really seemed to be going against the grain and trying many things that could be considered ‘out there’ to the traditionalists. Or maybe it was just all the LARP’ers these games attracted. Probably the LARP’ers.
I fell in with a small group of three other young dudes who were determined to play these games with their rules as written, instead of the ‘rules lite’ approach that some of the WoD books almost recommended. It’s not that I don’t like LARP’ers, but… okay, that’s not true. I don’t like LARP’ers. There, I said it. Happy now?
At any rate, I had a sweet character concept all thought up and was eager to get going with our game. Only problem was, my concept was for a different game. Up until about five minutes before we sat down to create characters, I really thought we were going to be playing Vampire. It was the game we had been discussing, after all. “I decided we should play Werewolf instead,” the GM remarked. Well, I was brought up with traditional RPG values. If the GM says we’re playing Game-X, we’re playing Game-X goddammit. However, I have to admit, I didn’t ‘get’ everything about Werewolf at the time. I have a much better understanding of the concept behind the game nowadays, but I’m almost 100% certain the character I created for the game was a reflection of my lack of Werewolf lore.
The other two players in the group had gone the more typical route and created chiseled, buff and handsome characters who probably knew 900 ways to kill a man with their bare hands. I do believe they both belonged to the Get of Fenris tribe (if you’ve never played this game, they’re a tribe loosely based on Scandinavian and Germanic warriors). Being a contrary little bastard, I went the other way and came up with a character who belonged to the Glass Walkers (the city dwellers of this game), Tommy McQueen (not the guy who used to play for West Ham) – a fat, lazy businessman with all the charm of a snake oil salesman. I even channeled a little bit of George Carlin and had my character ride a motorcycle on the weekends and hang out at biker joints he didn’t really belong in (where he picked up the “Love Handles” nickname). Carlin described these annoying weekend bikers as the type of idiots who had their bikes trucked into the rally at Sturgis and then rode them in for the last half mile or so… that was Tommy McQueen, a complete phony.
However, McQueen had a sizeable bank balance, and even if he was a slime ball, he could fast talk… so he became the mouthpiece for the group. In a fight though… he got the hell out of Dodge. Even in wolf form, he was still a blobby, grotesquely overweight sloth, so he offered few if any useful skills in combat, other than providing distractions. He never really conformed to the typical Garou traits, was probably too self-centered to completely understand why he was meant to defend Gaia, and certainly was not a spiritual being like the other characters (he had pretty much no chance of learning any Gifts from the spirits). Perhaps if the campaign had continued, it would’ve been interesting to see if Love Handles discovered what his true calling was, or if he ever got more in touch with his spiritual side. As the campaign ended and the three Garou parted company, Love Handles rode his ridiculously expensive bike into the sunset. His current status is unknown, but without his warrior buddies protecting him any longer, he probably wouldn’t make it that long on his own without hiring some more beefstakes as bodyguards. The original character sheet is sadly some 2,000 miles away from me, stuffed in a manilla folder with a whole stack of other RPG related paraphanalia, so I doubt I’ll be digging this guy out for another ride in the sun anytime soon…
