When It Goes Sideways
Roll d66 (two dice, first as tens and second as units, 11 to 66) when a stunt fails and you want it spectacular, not punishing. A failed trick crashes a market stall or sets off a firework indoors. It never just does nothing. Hand out Flow to anyone who rolls with it.
| d66 | What Happens |
|---|---|
| 11 | Full Send, Full Faceplant. The Hero commits to the big one with their whole heart and eats concrete in front of absolutely everyone (3 Grit), sliding to a stop face-first at the feet of the exact people they were trying to impress. But get straight back up, spit out the gravel, and finish the trick anyway, and the crowd's roar of respect is worth more than landing it clean ever could have been. The scar's a bonus. The scar's a story. |
| 12 | The Stall Special. A cart, a kiosk, a fruit stand, gone, obliterated, in a glorious cascade of produce and outrage. The vendor screams a curse older than the ban, the Hero surfaces wearing a watermelon like a helmet and a garland of somebody's onions, and the noise turns exactly one wrong head at exactly the wrong moment. The crowd, it must be said, is delighted. The vendor is not. The vendor will remember this. The vendor has a cousin in every sector. |
| 13 | Wrong Firework, Right Now. Something meant to go off later goes off here instead, in a confined space, at head height, with a bang that rearranges everyone's ears and a flash that prints the Crew's silhouettes on the far wall. It is, briefly, the most beautiful thing anyone in the alley has ever seen. It is also a flare that tells every Talos unit in the sector the Crew's exact postcode, apartment number, and current facial expression. |
| 14 | The Silent Alarm. Nothing happens. That's the whole problem, and it's worse than a bang. A silent trip means the Crew is now racing a clock they can't see, with the Dogs already rolling, already quiet, already on their way with the lights off. The Crew won't know until they hear the engines, or worse, until they don't hear anything at all, and the street they're on has gone strangely, deliberately empty around them. |
| 15 | Dropped the Goods. The one piece of gear that mattered slips loose and goes over the edge, tumbling in slow motion past every floor while the whole Crew watches. It's not broken, just gone: wedged on a ledge three storeys down, balanced on an awning, or riding off in the back of a passing truck. Somebody has to go get it, in style, in a hurry, and the clock does not care how good the retrieval looks. |
| 16 | The Whole Block Heard That. Whatever just happened, it echoed: dropped tools, a snapped cable, a crash off sheet metal that rolls across the entire floor or street like a struck bell. Every head turns in unison, a whole crowd of faces swinging toward the Crew at once, and somewhere a very slow realisation begins. Heat rises by 1, and for one long, silent, held-breath second, nobody moves, and then everybody does. |
| 21 | Caught on Camera. A phone, a drone, a platform lens catches the Crew clean, in focus, in colour, mid-piece. Half the sector's about to see it, which is fantastic for the reputation and catastrophic for the Heat. Patrols in the area double by morning, and the footage, annoyingly, is really good, well framed, well lit, the kind of clip that makes the Crew look like legends, which is exactly the problem, because now everyone knows what legends they are. |
| 22 | Spooked the Wrong Person. An ally, a witness, a jumpy local panics at the worst possible instant, grabs a weapon or a phone or just opens their lungs and screams, and now there's a full scene where the Crew desperately needed thirty more seconds of quiet. The panicker means no harm. The panicker is, in fact, terribly sorry. The panicker is also still screaming, and it's carrying, and it's bringing everything. |
| 23 | The Cascade. One small knock starts it, and then it doesn't stop: shelves, drums, scaffolding, a whole wall of stacked scrap, going down like dominoes in a chain reaction that seems to take a geological age (Nerves+Cool Reaction to dodge). The noise is apocalyptic. The mess is total. On the bright side, it is genuinely one of the most impressive accidental things anyone present will ever witness, and the crowd's slow clap is, in its way, sincere. |
| 24 | Wind Takes You. Up high, a gust of city wind reaches out and grabs the Hero or their load like it has a personal grudge (Brawn+Endure Reaction). Get slammed into a wall (Hurt Condition) or lose the crate to the long drop below. The city itself just threw a punch, unprovoked, and up here on the wire there's nothing to grab, nobody to blame, and a very long moment to think about it on the way to the wall. |
| 25 | The Lockdown. Whatever tripped, it tripped everything at once. Doors seal with a sound like a vault closing, the complex goes dark and hostile, and the Crew is on the wrong side of all of it. Reinforcements are inbound, the friendly exits are now walls, and the only way out from here is loud, expensive, and immediate. The building has decided the Crew are guests now. Permanent ones. It would like them to stay. |
| 26 | Wrong Colour, Right Wall. The tag comes out perfect and completely, catastrophically wrong: incriminating, insulting, or aimed square at the exact faction the Crew needed to keep sweet. It looks incredible. It is also a signed confession, a declaration of war, or both, painted six feet tall, and somebody important, somebody with a long memory and short patience, is going to walk past it, read it, and know exactly who to blame. |
| 31 | The Board Snaps. Mid-trick the deck, the frame, the wheels give out with a crack like a gunshot (the Ride takes a Condition, or is simply gone). The Hero rides out the landing on pure nerve, one bare foot, and a shower of sparks, somehow staying upright through sheer refusal, and now they're on foot with the clock still running, cradling two halves of a board that got them this far and picked this exact moment to quit. |
| 32 | Stuck the Landing, Lost the Loot. The Hero nails it, absolutely nails it, the cleanest landing of their life, and on impact the bag, the crate, the whole entire point of the job pops open and rains its contents across the street below like confetti. Beautiful trick. Genuinely flawless. Now go and pick up forty scattered somethings off the pavement, one by one, in front of a growing and increasingly interested crowd, while the moment curdles from triumph into chores. |
| 33 | The Sympathy Crowd. A knot of onlookers sees the crash and surges in to help, fussing, filming, offering water, blocking every single exit with pure, suffocating kindness. The Crew is completely fine. The Crew cannot move. The Crew is now the centre of a caring, immovable, phone-wielding scrum of good samaritans, every one of them recording, every one of them about to describe the Crew in loving detail to whoever asks next. |
| 34 | Paint Everywhere. A can bursts, a nozzle jams wide open, a rig ruptures, and the Hero is instantly a walking colour swatch, dripping, unmistakable, and vivid in the most literal sense. Every witness for the rest of the night gives the exact same description, and it is a memorable one, because there is precisely one person in the sector who currently looks like they lost a fight to a rainbow, and it's the one the Dogs are now looking for. |
| 35 | Woke the Dog. The noise reaches exactly one animal, a junkyard dog, a guard's mutt, a nervous rooftop goose with rage in its heart, and it comprehensively loses its mind. The Crew's stealth is over, finished, undone by a creature that will not, cannot, stop until it is fed, calmed, or an entire block away, and it is faster than it looks, and it has friends, and the friends are also awake now. |
| 36 | Gravity Wins This Round. The gap was too far and the Hero knows it half a second too late, in that awful airborne moment where the maths finishes itself. They make the far ledge with their fingertips and absolutely nothing else (Brawn+Endure Reaction, or a Hurt Condition), dangling over the drop, watching the plan carry on beautifully without them while they very carefully do not look down and very urgently need a hand. |
| 41 | The Sprinklers. Something triggers the fire suppression and the whole floor gets a sudden, cold, indoor monsoon. Fantastic for washing off tracker-dye, catastrophic for wet paint, slick floors, and the electrical gear the Crew was carefully carrying. Heat rises by 1 as the alarms chase the water, and everyone present is now soaked, blinking, and standing in an ankle-deep puddle under strobing red lights, which is nobody's idea of a clean getaway. |
| 42 | Snagged. A strap, a sleeve, a bag catches on a bolt, a fence, a passing rail, and yanks the Hero to a dead, jarring stop, or halfway off it. Cut loose fast (Crime+Dexterity) and leave a torn scrap of the crew's colours behind, fluttering, a perfect calling card for whoever finds it, examines it, and starts asking around about a crew that wears exactly that shade of exactly that fabric. |
| 43 | The Understudy Alarm. The Crew disabled the main alarm perfectly, professionally, beautifully, and completely forgot the ancient backup one, which now announces itself with a rattling brass bell nobody has heard ring in a decade. It is quaint. It is deafening. It has already been going for ten full seconds. Somewhere, an old caretaker is delighted the bell still works. Everyone else is now extremely aware the Crew is here. |
| 44 | Right in Front of the Kids. The failure happens in front of a crowd of young writers who worship the Crew, and the whole shining illusion of untouchable legend cracks in real time, live, on their little faces. Play it off with style (Smooth+Speech) and turn the faceplant into a lesson, a bit, a bigger legend about getting back up. Or watch the reputation chip, quietly, as one kid whispers something to another and they both look away. |
| 45 | The Slow Leak. Nothing dramatic, just a hiss the Crew clocks and ignores: a cracked tank, a bleeding line, a fuel drip going pat, pat, pat somewhere in the gear. Three scenes later it matters enormously, at the worst conceivable moment, and someone in the Crew will remember, with perfect clarity, that they heard it, and shrugged, and said nothing, and the look they give themselves is its own small punishment. |
| 46 | Overshot. The trick works too well, which is its own kind of disaster: too much speed, too much air, too much charge, and the Hero rockets clean past the target into somewhere they very much did not plan to be. The next roof. The wrong room. A Vivid boardroom mid-meeting. The exact centre of a patrol's coffee break, arriving at speed, fully committed, with absolutely no plan for what happens after "hello." |
| 51 | The Wrong Twin. The Crew trusted the contact, the map, the safe route, and it was the decoy, the double, the plant, the whole time. Nobody's hurt yet. But the plan just walked the Crew somewhere the enemy chose, on the enemy's schedule, into the enemy's shape of room, and the enemy is smiling, and the smile is the worst part, because it's been smiling for a while now, waiting for the Crew to notice. |
| 52 | Butterfingers on the Rail. The precious thing, the chip, the can of banned red, the only fuse wire in the sector, slips out of a glove and bounces once, twice, with the cruel unhurried physics of a nightmare, and comes to rest somewhere appalling: a grate, a gap, the bed of a moving vehicle, an outstretched hand that is very much not the Crew's, attached to someone who is now looking down at it, then up at the Crew, with dawning understanding. |
| 53 | The Photobomb. A Vivid promo drone or a tourist's live feed catches the Crew mid-mistake and beams it straight onto a public screen, enormous, crisp, in slow motion, for the whole square to see and a jaunty ad jingle to accompany. Instant fame, instant flawless description, and Talos was, of course, watching that exact feed, because Talos watches all the feeds, and this one just got interesting. |
| 54 | Grinded Through the Wet Cement. The perfect line runs straight across something that had not, crucially, set yet: fresh concrete, wet tar, a painter's floor. The Hero leaves behind a flawless, permanent, deeply traceable record of exactly where they went and precisely which way they were heading, immortalised in stone, a beautiful arrow pointing after the Crew that will still be there, hardened and helpful, when the Dogs come to read it in the morning. |
| 55 | The Wardrobe Malfunction. A mask slips, a hood falls, a scarf tears away at the precise moment a camera or a witness has a clean, unobstructed angle. For one single heartbeat the Hero has a real, nameable, recordable face on the record. Cover fast, spin, improvise, or spend the rest of the campaign as a known quantity, a wanted poster with a good likeness, recognised on the street by strangers who saw the clip. |
| 56 | Kicked the Hornet Loose. The stunt dislodges something that swarms: a drone cluster, an actual nest, a rack of loose cans, a pallet of something round that rolls. It scatters everywhere at once, into the crowd, down the stairs, under the patrol's feet, off the edge, and the chaos takes on a furious life entirely its own, no longer the Crew's problem to cause and now very much everyone's problem to survive, especially the patrol. |
| 61 | The Standing Ovation Trap. The trick is so good the whole street erupts, cheering, whistling, chanting, which is wonderful, and also pins the Crew in a spotlight of two hundred delighted, phone-waving witnesses at the exact moment they needed to melt quietly into the dark. You cannot sneak out of a standing ovation. You have to bow. And every second spent bowing is a second the Dogs use to close the distance to the star of the show. |
| 62 | Blew the Fuse Early. The show, the diversion, the big glorious finish goes off ahead of schedule, before the Crew is clear, before the pieces are set, before a single person is ready. It is spectacular. It is genuinely magnificent. It is also premature by a catastrophic margin, and now the entire timeline is on fire, literally in at least one sense, and the Crew is improvising the second half of a plan whose first half just detonated. |
| 63 | The Loyal Idiot. An ally, a rookie, a beloved Supporting Character sees the Crew struggling and charges in to "help" in the loudest, least useful, most enthusiastic way physically possible, transforming a quiet, solvable problem into a group project the entire block can hear. Their heart is pure gold. Their timing is a war crime. The situation is now unrecoverable, and they are so proud, and nobody has the heart to tell them, and there's no time anyway. |
| 64 | Crossed the Wrong Crew. The failed stunt wrecks another crew's fresh piece, blocks their run, or drops the Crew uninvited straight into the middle of their turf mid-job. It was a genuine accident. They will absolutely not see it that way, not now, not ever, and so instead of one problem in the room there are now two, and the second one has numbers, home advantage, and a very specific grievance that just went personal. |
| 65 | The Recording Runs. Whatever went wrong, a Vivid system logged it clean and complete: timestamp, location, biometrics, the whole damning package, and the file is already uploading, bar creeping across a screen somewhere. The Crew has a short, shrinking window to reach the server and wipe it before a bored human on the other end hits play, sits up, and realises what they're looking at. The bar is at forty percent. Now forty-five. |
| 66 | Brought the House Down. The absolute worst case and the absolute best case, together, at once: the stunt structurally fails something enormous, a scaffold, a walkway, a stacked wall of scrap, a rooftop water tank, and it all comes down in a slow, magnificent, deafening, unstoppable collapse. Nobody who saw it will ever forget it. It will be told and retold and exaggerated for years. Neither will Talos forget it, and their version comes with a Heat spike and a manhunt. |