Random Encounters
Roll d66 (two dice, first as tens and second as units, 11 to 66). Thirty-six things that happen mid-Score, on the street, on a rooftop, deep inside a facility. When the pace needs a spike or a patrol is due, roll here. The suggested rolls are just that. Every one has a way to go loud.
| d66 | Encounter |
|---|---|
| 11 | The Following Balloon. A lone red party balloon bobs along behind the Crew. Not drifting. Following. Cornering when they corner. It's a Talos camera drone dressed as a child's balloon, and it is doing a genuinely unsettling job of it. Tag it (Tag and Bag) to trace its signal home, or crack it open (Focus+Fix, Critical). Pop it wrong and it lets out a silent scream only the Dogs can hear, and something starts rolling this way. Also, briefly, it looked sad. |
| 12 | The Dead Air. A stretch of the route goes wrong-silent, all the ambient roar of the city just stopping dead at some invisible line: no traffic, no wind, no pigeons, nothing. Sound-dampening tech, fresh boot prints, the smell of ozone. Ghost Grind riders feel weirdly at home here (+1). Everyone else rolls Nerves+Cool, Critical, or the quiet gets inside their head and starts asking questions, and one of the questions is why their own footsteps make no sound. |
| 13 | The Sleeper. Someone slumped in a corner isn't napping, they're drugged, slack, and clutching something in one fist too tight to be an accident. Help them (Focus+Heal, Critical) and maybe gain a dazed, grateful witness who saw exactly the wrong thing. Leave them and dodge the attention. Wrong treatment and they wake up swinging, shouting a name, causing precisely the scene the Crew was tiptoeing to avoid, and the name they shout is one the Crew is going to hear again. |
| 14 | The Lost Baby. A woman screams her baby is gone, then points at the single most lethal gap in sight: a ledge, a drop, a live rail. It's a painted rock with googly eyes and she is one hundred percent, tearfully serious about it. Go fetch "the baby" anyway (Nerves+Stunt) and the whole neighbourhood hears how the Crew risked their necks to save an infant, which is exactly the kind of legend that opens doors, and she names the rock after whoever retrieves it. |
| 15 | The Ice Cream Chase. A kid wails that someone stole their Ice Cream, and Ice Cream, it turns out, is a cat, and it has bolted into the crowd with the smug confidence of an animal that has never once been caught. Mini-chase, Need 6: the cat has Speed 2 and zero respect for gravity, walls, or the dignity of anyone pursuing it. The Floor is Lava riders never lose it. Everyone else is going to end up on a roof, out of breath, being judged by a cat. |
| 16 | The Suspicious Vendor. A cart rolls up selling food that's too cheap, portions too big, smell too good, and the vendor's eyes a little too knowing. This one knows things, real things, sector things. Informant, or just a local who saw something they can't unsee? Smooth+Speech to open them up, Crime+Streetwise to read whether the generosity has a hook in it. Eat first, ask later, and whatever's in the special takes the Crew out cold for hours, waking up somewhere else with the bill still owing. |
| 21 | The Underground Market. A whole train car or back alley has quietly become a bazaar: bootleg tech, street food, spray cans of deeply dubious origin, a man selling "genuine" Talos parts that are mostly painted tin. Spend Cash for extra paint (1$ a can). Crime+Streetwise to move through it safe, because a third of these "vendors" are Talos cataloguing every curious face, and one of the stalls is selling photographs of the Crew, taken tonight, which raises some questions. |
| 22 | The Ticking Package. An unmarked box sits abandoned in the middle of everything, ticking softly, and the whole floor has quietly decided it's the Crew's fault. It's a cheap kitchen timer somebody forgot, but the second anyone touches it a nervous bystander screams "bomb," and now there's a stampede, a phone filming, and three informants all describing the Crew. Walk past it like you own it (Nerves+Cool), or kill the panic before the panic kills the Score. |
| 23 | Emergency Protocol. Red lights, blaring announcements, doors grinding shut, the building's AI taking over in a calm voice that makes everything worse. Talos interference, or a genuine failure the Crew can ride? Work around it (Focus+Fix, Critical) or find the trigger (Focus+Detect). Trip more security and the Crew gets sealed into a dead-end section as it powers down around them, lights dying one bank at a time, while the calm voice thanks them for their cooperation. |
| 24 | The Amnesiac. A stranger sits blank, no name, no idea how they got here, staring at their own hands like they're new. Talos memory tech? A medical episode? A plant faking it to watch the Crew work up close? Help them back (Focus+Heal or Smooth+Speech) and something crucial might shake loose, a location, a warning, a scream. Or a violent episode does instead, because some of what was taken out of them was taken for a reason, and it's trying to come back. |
| 25 | The Dead-Eyed Guard. A security guard counts down the minutes to his break by the restrooms with the thousand-yard stare of a man who stopped caring years ago. He's seen everything and will trade "unofficial access" for a little charm or 1 Cash and someone to complain to. Push too hard and he gets suspicious. Push wrong and it turns out he's already on Talos payroll and sells the Crew to the highest bidder with the same dead expression he sells everything. |
| 26 | The Lost Shopper. An old woman clutches a shopping list written in a script nobody reads anymore, muttering about "the old entrance, before they moved it." She's a former employee who knows every back corridor and might have an ancient master card at the bottom of a handbag full of boiled sweets and mystery. Brush her off and lose the best guide going. Help her find the long-gone shop and she quietly hands the Crew a key to a door that isn't supposed to be there. |
| 31 | The Toolbox. A maintenance worker wrestles a massive toolbox, running on no sleep and less patience, and it is clearly, comically too heavy for one person. Help him carry it (Brawn+Force) and he lets slip he's headed to "the lower levels, the ones that aren't on the board." Keep him talking and the whole way down spills out. Drop the box and the crash of two hundred tools hitting the floor turns every single head on the floor toward the Crew at once. |
| 32 | The Lost Child. A small boy sobs that he can't find his mum, and helping him (Smooth+Speech) reveals that mum is a Talos operative who uses a "secret door" the kid can describe in perfect, devastating, unwitting detail. Handle it badly and his crying brings security, then it brings mum, who is worse. Handle it well and the Crew has a map to a door that Talos was very confident nobody knew about, drawn by the one person nobody thought to watch. |
| 33 | The Enthusiast. A "confused tourist" keeps loudly asking about exhibits and stations that don't exist, and digging in reveals a historian obsessed with the old city under the city, armed with maps, documents, and far, far too much excitement for the danger they're in. Great guide underground. Also stops, mid-getaway, mid-chase, mid-anything, to admire "historically significant" rubble, gasping, and will not be moved until someone agrees it's significant, which, to be fair, it usually is. |
| 34 | The Junkyard Dog. A low growl from behind the scrap: a real dog, scarred and enormous, that considers the entire lot its sovereign territory and the souvlaki in your pocket a tax owed. Feed it (1 Cash, or that souvlaki) and it leads the Crew through the maze like it owns the place, because it does. Spook it and it howls the whole neighbourhood awake, and it turns out the dog has a name, a history, and a lot of feelings about being startled. |
| 35 | The Nostalgic Officer. Tonight's patrol is one tired old Talos who remembers real Easter fireworks from his yiayia's roof and has clearly been thinking about them all shift. Approach right (Crime+Stealth, then Smooth+Speech) and he'll look the other way, maybe even point out what the Crew's after with a tilt of his chromed head. Read him wrong and the Crew is standing in arm's reach of a Bad Guy who was one wistful memory away from letting them go, and now isn't. |
| 36 | The Scrap Artist. Behind a wall of crushed cars, a wiry old man with burn-scarred hands shapes launch tubes from scrap by the light of a single bulb, over and over, not for money, just to remember how his hands used to move. Convince him it's real, that the sky's going to burn again (Smooth+Speech), and he hands over perfect work and a story. Panic him, or insult the craft, and he grabs the welding torch, and he is faster with it than a man his age has any right to be. |
| 41 | The Drone Swarm. Fist-sized security drones orbit in lazy figure-eights, paint-sensors glowing a soft, patient blue. They cluster and strobe the instant they clock a tag, then broadcast the Crew's position to everything that cares. Map the pattern (Crime+Awareness), slip the gaps, or fry the relay. Get tagged with a UV marker and Talos tracks the Crew all night like a glowing breadcrumb, and the drones, humming happily, follow at a polite distance, filming. |
| 42 | The Night Shift. A lone worker does inventory up a lift platform, headphones in, paint under her fingernails and a faded crew tag on her bag: one of us, working a Vivid job to eat. Win her over (Smooth+Speech) and she saves the Crew hours, pointing out which crates matter and which cameras don't. Spook her and reflex hits the panic button on her belt before her heart can override it, and then she's mortified, and then the Dogs are here, in that order. |
| 43 | The Catwalk. An upper catwalk gives a bird's-eye view of the whole floor and creaks like a complaint under every single step, up in bright fluorescents with nowhere to hide. Move quiet (Nerves+Stunt) or ride the shelf-tops just below the light (The Floor is Lava). A section of grating is one bolt from letting go at the worst possible moment, and everyone on the floor below is going to look up when it does, and there the Crew will be. |
| 44 | The Wrong Drum. Two identical barrels, same size, same weight, coded not named, sitting side by side like a magic trick daring the Crew to pick. One's exactly what the Crew came for. One's an industrial solvent that eats through metal, and skin, and the bottom of whatever they carry it in a block later. Decode it (Focus+Know) or grab both and sort it out later, praying, sweating, that nothing starts leaking in transit, which it will, if the roll was bad enough. |
| 45 | The Loading Dock Hustlers. On the way out, two small-timers leaning on a van clock the Crew hauling goods and their eyes light up like slot machines. One's big and blocking the exit; one's fast-talking and already running numbers out loud. Talk it down, cut them in, or lean on the rep. Turn it physical and the noise brings the Dogs, and the fast-talker, it turns out, can actually fight, and the big one can genuinely not, and neither of them saw that coming either. |
| 46 | The Forklift. The haul's too heavy to carry and there's a forklift on charge, keys in the ignition, and nobody in the Crew has ever driven one. It handles like a shopping cart full of bricks, it beeps when it reverses, and it is astonishingly, gloriously loud. Anyone who does something genuinely stupid and magnificent with it, a drift, a jump, a full ram through a roller door, earns 1 Flow for sheer audacity, and possibly a new lifelong love of forklifts. |
| 51 | The Neon Grid. The floor lights up under every footstep, turning the Crew into a walking constellation visible from every corridor, hallway, and camera in the building. Cross without tripping too many panels (Crime+Stealth or Nerves+Cool). Neon Trail flips the whole thing: light a false path across the grid and walk the patrols confidently, obediently, right off a metaphorical cliff, following footprints that were never there while the Crew strolls out behind them. |
| 52 | The Steam Vents. Steam blasts the tunnel at random intervals, great cover, terrible for skin, worse for timing. Ride the clouds past patrols (Crime+Stealth) but time it (Nerves+Cool) or get scalded pink. Chromatic Overload plus a wall of steam makes a rolling curtain of colour and fog, Total Cover for one turn, and briefly the most beautiful thing in the sector, a piece nobody will ever see finished because it's made of steam and nerve and it's already gone. |
| 53 | The Mechanical Arms. Robotic arms burst from the walls grabbing at anything that moves, a Talos operator watching lazily through a camera feed, sipping something. Dodge the gauntlet (Nerves+Stunt each turn), find the control room, or kill the arms one screeching joint at a time. Rail Slide Escape slides the Crew clean under the whole snapping mess in one glorious low pass, and the operator, on the feed, visibly puts down their drink. |
| 54 | The Holographic Decoys. Holographic Talos patrol the corridor, perfect flickering fakes that turn corners and react to noise, with the real Dogs mixed invisibly in among them. Spot the difference (Focus+Detect) before wasting paint on a ghost or walking cheerfully into an ambush. Tag and Bag is the counter: paint passes clean through a hologram and sticks fast to a real one, which is how the Crew learns, publicly, loudly, which of the six "cops" was going to hurt them. |
| 55 | The Market Weave. The street is packed with an evening market, food carts and hanging fabric and shoppers blocking every clean line, and the Crew is trying to ride fast through a space built entirely for walking slowly. Crowd Surfer turns the whole crowd into terrain, a moving skatepark of shoulders and awnings. Clip a cart and wear whatever was cooking for the rest of the night, marked, delicious-smelling, and impossible to describe to a witness without laughing. |
| 56 | The Face Scan. The route funnels the Crew into a packed chokepoint, a market square, a station concourse, a festival crush, with a Talos Dog planted dead in the middle of it methodically scanning faces. Blend and drift through (Crime+Stealth) or duck low and let the crowd swallow the Crew whole. One scream, one dropped can, one kid pointing and shouting a name, and the Dog snaps around, and the whole slow river of people becomes a trap with one exit. |
| 61 | The Wall of Metal. Something massive comes out of nowhere at speed, a cargo hauler, a transport barge, a train on the next line over, and at combined velocity it passes like a moving wall of steel less than a metre from the Crew's faces. Press flat (Nerves+Cool) or throw yourself clear (Nerves+Stunt, Extreme). The wind shear alone can peel a Hero off a ledge, and for one deafening second the whole world is rivets and noise and the specific smell of not-quite-dying. |
| 62 | The Curious Phone. A bystander leans out wide-eyed, phone already up and filming the Crew mid-piece with the delight of someone who knows this is going straight online. Post it and the Crew is either instant legends or freshly hunted, sometimes both by breakfast. Charm them into a better angle (Smooth+Flirt), or throw up a tag so funny they laugh instead of scream (Crime+Dexterity), and the video becomes a highlight reel instead of a wanted poster. |
| 63 | Into the Dark. The route plunges into sudden total black with zero warning, a tunnel, an underpass, a killed grid, walls the Crew can't see centimetres from their own faces, the city's roar turned physical and directionless. Thirty seconds of absolute nothing. Anyone moving fast holds their line by feel and prayer or gets scraped off by concrete that arrives without introduction. Ghost Grind riders paint the whole stretch blind, from muscle memory, and it comes out perfect. |
| 64 | The Squatter Family. A gutted upper floor is somebody's home now: fairy lights on a tapped line, washing strung across the void, kids asleep in a nest of blankets in the corner. Terrified of the Crew at first, until the father recognises the gear, the stance, the colours, and says, softly, that his mother taught him this exact trick, back when. A quiet ally, a safe floor, a warm welcome, if the kids don't wake up and scream the place down first. |
| 65 | The Heritage Alarm. The fast route cuts straight through a floodlit glass dome full of preserved ancient marble, silent, empty, and beautiful at night. Grind the exhibit rails across it (Nerves+Stunt) without tripping the Vivid-funded preservation alarms, which don't so much call Talos as personally invite them over for coffee. Do it clean and the Crew has, for one perfect moment, skated across two and a half thousand years of history without touching a single stone. Do it messy and the Crew owes the ages an apology. |
| 66 | The Dud. Something the Crew's carrying, a rocket, a paint charge, a salvaged battery, is unstable: cracked casing, brittle fuse, chemistry gone crystalline and sulky. Stabilise it (Focus+Fix, Extreme) or lob it off the roof, satisfying, wasteful, and the source of at least one new neighbourhood legend about the night the sky flashed for no reason. Let it cook in a pocket and it goes off exactly where the Crew is standing, at exactly the moment they'd finally started to relax. |