Skin Horse

Shaenon: Beth Bever wrote to show us the amazing character she created on World of Warcraft. The full story, according to Beth:

When the worgen (basically, werewolf) race finally came out, my werewolf-obsessed best friend insisted we make worgen to play together (despite the fact that worgen are Alliance and we are die-hard Horde players). Even though we don’t play on a roleplaying server, I still like having an idea of who my character is in order to get really into playing them. I decided I wanted a character loosely based on a webcomics character. I also wanted my worgen to be female and an engineer, so naturally I went with Florence Ambrose.

Unfortunately, while the male worgen look pretty awesome, the females look like deranged chihuahuas. Their eyes don’t even face the same direction, and they have a permanent snarl that I’m pretty sure is impossible for a canine face to perform without some kind of muscle spasm or perhaps a bit of rigor mortis. After a couple hours I couldn’t stand looking at her any more and, the character not being equipped with a paper bag, I needed to switch to a male.

I had a hard time thinking of a male wolfy character I would enjoy playing until the thought finally occurred to me, “Hey, wasn’t Tip a werewolf for a while?”

And thus was born Tipwilkin, restoration druid and wearer-of-dresses extraordinaire. Sadly the game has no short skirts, fairly limited character customization, and the male humans are… rugged… to put it nicely (the less said about the harelip the better). However, Tipwilkin spends most of his time in fuzzy mode, and I have spent altogether too much time and money buying him pretty things to wear and coordinating his gear (and I have loved it). Maybe one of these days I”ll make an undead hunter named Unity, with a pet wolf named Sweetheart…

As you can see from these stills, Warcraft Were-Tip is one stylish druid. He also has a kitten named Sweetheart, apparently. Thanks so much, Beth!

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Channing: This is the best use of MMORPGs in all history, all the way back to ancient Egypt. Druid is about spot-on for Tip, actually, so, good choice on that as well. And just look at those fabulous clothes!

I have to ask, though — I’ve never played WoW, so this is a very noob question — isn’t it weird to have a PC race who can turn into a wolf playing a class that can turn into another kind of wolf? It’d feel like, yeah, I want to turn into a wolf today, but which of my many ways to turn into a wolf do I want to use? Isn’t that weird?

Lastly, I think you underestimate the appeal of deranged Chihuahuas.