Action Movie World, Session One: "Big Trouble in Little Italy"

Here is the rundown of our inaugural game of Action Movie World: First Blood.

Not a scene from the game session but an incredible facsimile

My wife Gina acted as the director. The play group was four dudes. Gina chose the Barbarian Movie script, calling it Big Trouble in Little Italy and modeling it vaguely off of Las brujas de Zugarramurdi, aka Witching and Bitching. If you’re familiar with the movie, it’s a Spanish horror-comedy about a group of bank robbers who run into a coven of witches and a lot of material that seems like it’s satire or social commentary, but it's sometimes unclear. (Gina watched this with me, fell in love with it, and said "I have to rip off everything possible for the Action Movie World game.")

The game was set in New York in the 1980s. One of the mechanics of Action Movie World is that you play an actor, who in turn plays a character in the movie. I played fictional Austrian actor Flynn Buchleitner as “Roy Cannon,” an Italian deli owner. I picked the Musclehead playbook and I modeled myself after Arnold Schwarzenegger. Deliberate miscasting was part of the joke. The rest of the cast consisted of:

Scott McCheddar as “Race Cannon,” Roy’s older brother, a New York cab driver. Pugilist playbook. Modeled after Christopher Lambert. Yes, Christopher Lambert and Arnold Schwarzenegger are Italian brothers in 1980s New York.

Berkeley Blower as “Salvatore Stromboli,” an entrepreneur who ran a fledgeling gelato empire out of a storage unit on the edge of town. Stromboli and Race were old buddies from way back. He also had a samurai sword. Yeller playbook, modeled after Brian Blessed. Pretty sure he yelled “DIVE” at least once.

Javier Simpson as “Trapp,” a Smartass who hooked up with Roy Cannon’s wife Maria after they divorced. Trapp shacked up with Maria while Roy lived above the deli. Trapp had been unemployed for years and constantly lied about having job interviews. He was a terminal freeloader. His crowning moment came when we were trying to get some information at a retirement home and he convinced us to stay so we could bum a free lunch.

The plot was simple and probably fairly offensive, but we were rolling Eighties style. A coven of witches kidnapped Roy Cannon’s wife and son, holding them hostage until Race Cannon agreed to, er, have relations with the lead witch so she could maintain her immortality. In return, Race would ostensibly be given great mortal power, but in truth would just have his life force drained away. This resulted in an endless series of jokes about male sexual anxiety, followed by Eighties freeze frame high fives.

Before we got to the final showdown, there were lots of smaller showdowns, which involved beating up punks at pool halls, shooting up a band of sorcerers in a darkened room, and -- my favorite -- a violent altercation in the deli itself where Roy Cannon put some goon’s head in the meat slicer while quipping “YOUR ORDER IS UP.”

This temporarily sidetracked the game while we had to dispose of the carnage afterward. Race said he could make the cleanup sequence into his training montage, so I cued up Stan Bush’s “The Touch” on the playlist and we all described how we fixed up the wrecked deli and cleaned up the mess. When the cops came, we gave them sandwiches and Stromboli told them an old lady with epilepsy had driven a Volkswagen through the front door.

My second favorite moment was when Race was going into the posh high-rise apartment to pretend to go along with the ritual. The rest of us tried to bluff our way past the doorman (which didn’t work), then Trapp the Smartass tried to threaten his way in (which didn’t work), then tried to throat-punch the doorman (which didn’t work). Finally the doorman said “sir, first of all, Mr. Cannon is allowed to have guests; second of all, you’ve been parked in front of the building for twenty minutes and we all saw Mr. Cannon get out of his own cab.” Our characters were all enormous idiots.

Then there was a giant showdown on the penthouse roof, with all the meathead heroes vs. bodyguards and witches. It was horrifying and bloody and hilarious and people made bad one-liners before killing people. So, all true to form. At least two railing kills.

Mechanical Notes

During the first session, we got our Camaraderie to 3, but called upon it last-minute for some reason, so didn’t get that sweet XP at the end. This time, the Smartass made a bunch of one-liners that landed both dice-wise and at the table, got us back to Camaraderie and we stayed there. I was at five harm during the first session (the movie was split into two sessions) and wanted badly to die, but not during the first session, so I held on. Unfortunately, I aced all my Violence rolls in the second session and couldn’t get it together to take any harm! So Roy Cannon lived. In fact, all the supporting characters lived, which I thought was almost too bad. But everyone was still getting used to the system, and I think deliberately killing yourself off is still pretty counter-intuitive to most of us.

Stromboli cut somebody’s arm off with his sword while making jokes about “disarming” and “hands off.” Roy kicked over the witch’s cauldron during the final ritual and yelled “party’s over.” Race managed to pull off the Vengeance move when his sorta-girlfriend (they’d hooked up once in the back room of the deli) was killed by the head witch. It was a pretty blatant fridging, but we all agreed it was well within genre. The gang escaped with Roy’s wife and son safely rescued. I pulled off a Love Scene move that resulted in Maria dumping Trapp and getting back together with Roy, thus reinforcing the nuclear family as any Reagan-era movie should. The final shot was of Maria looking back on the burning ritual space with demonic eyes, leaving the story open for a sequel.

The general consensus afterward was that this was a wildly fun game, and everyone seemed to love the conceit of the actors-playing-characters. This was the first *World game for most of the players, and people were eager for more. We scheduled another session, with a new GM (not me), for the next week. I’m eager to see what we get up to. Gina had a lot of fun directing but is looking forward to getting back in the player’s seat.