Style Wars

A rival crew rolls up and it's on. Style Wars are trick-for-trick battles that can flare up anywhere, any time: a contested wall, a crossed line, an old grudge, or just two crews in the same spot with something to prove. Each turn, decide who takes it (roll a die, call it, or run it as a contest of the Heroes' rolls against the rival crew), then describe what the other crew actually does.

When the rivals win the turn, roll on Their Best Trick. When they blow it, roll on Their Big Wipeout. Both tables are for the crew across from the Heroes, so the Crew feels the competition breathing down their neck. When a Hero pulls off their own move, describe it yourself, and reach for When It Goes Sideways when one of them eats it.

Their Best Trick

Roll d66. The rival crew nails it. Every one should earn a grudging "okay, respect" from the table, then make the Heroes want to top it.

d66	Their Best Trick
11	The Bus Surf. Their rider grinds the full length of a moving bus roof, leans casually back into the slipstream, and takes selfies with a row of gobsmacked tourists who will treasure the photos forever, then steps off onto the next bus like the whole city runs on moving walkways built for exactly this. The tourists tip them. They accept.
12	The Signature in Smoke. They bomb an entire underpass in one single unbroken line without ever stopping, their crew name flowing three metres tall the whole length of it, letters connecting like they were always one word, and coast out the far end before the paint's even stopped dripping. By the time anyone thinks to give chase, there's just a wet, perfect, enormous name and no rider.
13	The Gravity Lie. They drop off a rooftop, kick off a billboard, off a balcony rail, off a hanging shop sign, chaining impossible contacts down the face of the building, and touch the board down so softly it doesn't make a single sound. Everyone watching will swear, for the rest of their lives, that for one full second the rider simply hung there in the air, and no footage will ever convince them otherwise.
14	The Chrome Kiss. They grind a rail that runs right past a Talos Dog, tag the officer's mirror-chrome shoulder mid-slide with a flick of the wrist, and are three rooftops gone before the suit has finished turning around to see who touched it. The tag stays up for hours, a little crew signature riding around on a cop, and the Dog won't know until someone films it laughing.
15	The Ceiling Run. They ride the underside of a metro overpass on mag-wheels, fully upside down, tagging the concrete over everyone's heads while commuters below crane their necks and drop their phones, and then flip back down to the street without spilling a single can or missing a single beat. Somebody's yiayia crosses herself. Somebody's kid decides, right there, what they want to be.
16	The Human Ramp. Two of their crew drop and brace their own boards into a makeshift ramp while a third launches off it, clearing a parked car, a fence, a startled man eating a pie, and lands riding switch on the far side like the whole thing was choreographed for a film nobody told the man with the pie he was in. The two ramp riders are already up and gone.
21	The Firework Finish. They land the trick and, at the exact peak of it, set off a single perfect flare, painting themselves in gold light for one frozen, holy second while the whole street inhales at once and then absolutely loses its mind. It's illegal, it's dangerous, it's showing off in its purest form, and it is, everyone silently agrees, completely worth it.
22	The Blindfold Line. They pull a scarf down over their eyes, ride a rail they have provably never seen before by feel and sound and pure arrogance alone, land it dead clean, and then lift the blindfold with the bored expression of someone checking whether it stopped raining. The crew that dared them to try it does not have a follow-up. There is no follow-up to that.
23	The Wall Ride. They ride straight up a vertical wall, carry a full storey of it sideways past a window of office workers who forget entirely about their spreadsheets, tagging as they go, and come back down to the street still grinding, still tagging, still grinning. One of the office workers quits the next morning. They just watched someone be free and couldn't unsee it.
24	The No-Look Pass. Mid-run, at speed, they toss a can behind their back to a crewmate without so much as a glance, the crewmate snatches it out of the air, finishes their own line with it, and lobs it back, and it lands in the first rider's hand exactly when it needs to. Neither of them slows down. Neither of them looks. They've done this ten thousand times and it still looks like a magic trick.
25	The Curtain Call. They time an enormous piece to finish at the precise moment the sun clears the towers, so the first raw light of the day hits their name and nothing else on the whole skyline, blazing. Half the sector stops dead to watch it catch fire in the dawn. It's not just good, it's astronomical, it's scheduled, they made the sun part of the crew.
26	The Market Weave. They ride through a packed market at full, absurd speed, threading gaps that shouldn't exist, snatch a souvlaki off a grill in passing, flip a coin to the vendor mid-air to pay for it, catch the vendor's grin, and never once touch, clip, or startle a single soul in the crush. The vendor keeps the coin and the story in equal measure.
31	The Ghost Line. They cut every light on their gear, board, wheels, everything, and ride an entire rooftop run in pure silhouette against the moon, so all anyone below sees is a moving shape and, in the morning, a trail of paint along an edge no sane person should have been able to ride in the dark. The scene argues for weeks about whether it even happened. The paint says it did.
32	The Statue. They pop up into a handstand on the nose of the board while grinding a rail, hold it perfectly, impossibly, dead still for the entire length of the slide, upside down and motionless like a monument to balance itself, then step off at the end like they're dismounting a horse. Somebody takes a photo. The photo looks fake. It isn't.
33	The Double Dutch. Two of their riders cross each other's lines at full speed in the dead centre of a busy intersection, missing by literal centimetres, each tagging the opposite wall at the exact same instant, and never once break eye contact through the whole terrifying pass. It's synchronised, it's suicidal, it's clearly been practised somewhere that no longer has functioning walls.
34	The Redecoration. They repaint a Vivid billboard in the time it takes the ad to loop through once, so the very next cycle shows the whole square their piece instead of whatever they were selling, seamless, professional, done. Nobody saw them climb up. Nobody saw them climb down. The ad never officially glitched. Vivid's still trying to work out how the owl got a moustache.
35	The Long Grind. They lock onto a rail and simply refuse to get off it, riding around a corner, down a full staircase, across a plaza, hopping clean onto another rail, one continuous grind that lasts an entire city block while a crowd runs alongside counting it out loud, and when they finally step off the count has become a chant and the chant has become their name.
36	The Catch. A crewmate wipes out badly, genuinely badly, headed for the pavement, and their rider swoops in from nowhere, grabs them by the wrist mid-fall, and drags them back onto their feet and their board without losing the line or the speed. Then, because they're already up and moving, the two of them just finish the trick together, like the save was always part of it.
41	The Chandelier. They swing off a hanging sign, spin twice in the air trailing a spiral of paint that hangs in the streetlight like a signature written in three dimensions, and land facing fully backward, riding out blind, arms wide, grinning at the people they just left behind. The spiral drifts down slowly. People try to catch it. You can't catch it. That's the point.
42	The Encore. They land the trick, clean, done, applause building, and then, when the crowd starts cheering, they turn around and do the whole thing again, harder, bigger, with one extra element that shouldn't be possible, purely because they can and they want the crowd to know they can. The second one is better than the first. That's the flex. The second one is always better.
43	The Slow Wave. They lift something clean off a parked Talos vehicle, tag the door with a little heart, and are three rooftops away before the alarm even thinks about going off. When it finally does, howling into the night, they stop, turn, and give it a slow, unbothered wave from the skyline, then carry on. The alarm is, at that point, purely decorative.
44	The Levitation. They ride the blast of a steam vent straight up onto a ledge nobody without wings should be able to reach, tag it while balanced on nothing, and then catch the next timed blast back down to the street, both jumps landed perfectly, like the city's own machinery has agreed to be their elevator. The vent hisses again behind them, right on cue, like applause.
45	The Portrait. They freehand a flawless portrait of a fallen scene legend on a wall, at speed, in the dark, from memory, and it's recognisable from the far end of the street, the eyes exactly right, the smile exactly right. By morning there are candles under it, and flowers, and a small quiet crowd, and nobody minds at all that a rival crew painted it, because some things are bigger than the beef.
46	The Drift. They throw the board into a full power-slide around an entire roundabout, kicking up a rooster-tail of sparks that lights the whole junction orange, tagging every single lamppost on the way round without straightening up once, and exit precisely the way they came in, only backward, only faster, only grinning. Traffic stops. Nobody honks. Even the drivers know what they're looking at.
51	The Trapeze. They leap from a moving tram to a fire escape to a balcony to a rooftop, four gaps, no board ever touching the ground, catching each surface with the calm of someone crossing a living room, and land rolling straight into a grind like they'd measured every centimetre in advance, which, terrifyingly, they had. The tram carries on. The passengers are still clapping a block later.
52	The Overpaint. A rival tags aggressively over their piece, an insult, a declaration, and instead of getting angry they simply tag over the rival's tag, better, cleaner, funnier, in the same thirty seconds, folding the disrespect into the design so it looks like it was always meant to be there. The insult is now the best part of the wall. The rival crew leaves quietly.
53	The Slow Clap. They pull off something so clean, so effortless, so utterly without strain that even the crew they're battling against stops competing and just starts to applaud, one pair of hands at first, then all of them. That's the win. No score needed. When the other crew claps for you, the Style War is over, and everybody present knows exactly who took it.
54	The Escape Artist. Boxed in hard by two Dogs closing from either side, they thread the shrinking gap between them so tight their colours physically brush both chrome shoulders, tag a little heart on the wall behind as they pass, and are simply gone. The two Dogs, committed and too slow to stop, collide with each other in the space where the rider used to be. It's on the Radio within the hour.
55	The Skyline. They tag their crew name across the tops of six water tanks on six different rooftops so that from one specific angle, at one specific height, at one specific time of evening, the entire skyline reads their name, a message you can only see if you know exactly where to stand, which means everyone in the scene now makes the pilgrimage to stand there.
56	The Baptism. They ride straight through a burst water main, come out the other side soaked and shining and haloed in spray, and immediately lay down a piece in glow-pigment that burns brighter for the wet, blazing off the dark wall like it's plugged into the moon. It lasts all night, screaming colour into every camera and dreaming window on the block, and they didn't even slow down to do it.
61	The Fake-Out. They wind up for a colossal trick, the whole crowd holds its breath, phones rise, tension peaks, and then they do something tiny and perfect instead, a single flawless flick of a move, and somehow that is a hundred times cooler than the big thing everyone was braced for, and they knew it would be, and they let everyone lean all the way in before giving them the small one.
62	The Relay. Their whole crew paints one continuous piece in a moving line, each rider adding a single letter at full speed as they pass the wall, so the crew name finishes itself in real time, the last letter landing exactly as the last rider clears the far edge, a signature written by four people who never once stopped moving. It looks rehearsed because it is. It looks impossible because it also is.
63	The Halo. They grind a circular rail all the way around a rooftop dome, tagging continuously the entire way round, so the finished piece is a perfect unbroken ring of colour crowning the whole building, a halo visible from the street far below and from every tower for a kilometre. It takes one pass. One. Nobody breathes until they step off, and then everybody does at once.
64	The Comeback. They wipe out hard, badly, embarrassingly, in front of everyone, the kind of fall that ends nights, and then they get up, shake it off, grin at their own disaster, and land the exact trick on the very next try, bigger than before, and the crowd loves the recovery more than a clean run ever could have earned. Falling and getting up is the whole art. They just proved it live.
65	The Whisper. They pull off the entire thing with nobody watching at all, no crowd, no cheer, no witness, just a perfect, complex, impossible piece that is simply there in the cold morning light where the night before there was nothing but a blank wall and a locked gate. No footage. No claim. Just the work, and the growing legend of a crew good enough to not even need you to see it.
66	The Masterpiece. They land the impossible one, the trick the whole scene has tried and every single one has stuck to the pavement attempting, and they do it in front of everyone who matters, and then they paint their name across the wall behind them as they ride out, unhurried, like signing a canvas. The whole city will talk about it for a season. Give them the moment, fully, no interruption. It's earned, and pretending otherwise would be a lie the Crew's own reputation can't afford.

Their Big Wipeout

Roll d66. The rival crew eats it. Never just "they miss", make it spectacular enough that the whole table giggles.

d66	Their Big Wipeout
11	The Faceplant. They line up the big one, commit with their entire soul, and eat pavement in front of absolutely everyone, sliding a full glorious metre face-first to a stop at the exact feet of the crew they were trying to impress, who look down at them with something almost like sympathy. Almost. Somebody helps them up. Somebody else already has the clip.
12	The Stall Special. They clip a fruit cart at speed and take the entire thing with them, and when the dust and the produce settle they are sitting in a small mountain of oranges wearing a burst watermelon like a helmet, while the vendor stands over them screaming a curse that will follow them across three sectors. An orange rolls, slowly, meaningfully, to a stop against their boot.
13	The Wrong Wall. They lay down a huge, confident, beautiful tag, step back with their arms crossed to admire it, and slowly realise they have spelled their own crew's name wrong, three metres tall, in permanent paint, in front of witnesses, one of whom is already quietly saying it out loud to double-check. The letters are gorgeous. The word is not the word. There is no fixing it.
14	The Sticky Landing. They absolutely nail the trick, the landing is perfect, and then the perfect landing goes straight into a patch of fresh wet cement, and now they are stuck, mid-triumphant-pose, sinking slowly, waving one increasingly frantic hand for help while trying to maintain the expression of someone who meant to do this and is having a wonderful time.
15	The Paint Bath. Their can explodes mid-shake and covers them head to toe in their own crew colour, instantly, comprehensively, from hood to boots. They finish the run anyway, dripping, glowing, unmistakable, looking exactly like a person who lost a fight to a rainbow, and fooling precisely nobody about who they are or what crew they ride for. The colour, at least, is really nice.
16	The Overshoot. They hit the ramp far, far too hot, sail clean over the rail, over the gap, over the landing, over the entire intended trick, and vanish into a hedge, a dumpster, or an open first-floor window with a distant crash. A pause. Then, from within, a single muffled thumbs-up emerges, followed eventually by the rider, picking leaves out of their hair with tremendous dignity.
21	The Gravity Correction. Halfway up a gorgeous wall ride, physics abruptly remembers they exist and revokes the whole arrangement, and they slide back down the vertical wall slowly, squeaking the entire way, in front of the exact office window full of people they were showing off to, who wave. They wave back. There is nothing else to do. They wave back.
22	The Snag. Their sleeve catches on a rail bolt and spins them into a full, unplanned, involuntary pirouette, board departing in one direction and dignity in another, ending in a heap on the ground that a nearby cat regards with open, unhurried contempt before slowly walking away, having seen enough. The pirouette was, technically, quite graceful. Nobody will mention this.
23	The Dud. They set up the big finish, the firework, the flare, the grand pyrotechnic flourish, milk the moment, wait for the crowd to hush, and it goes off with a sad little pop and a thin wisp of grey smoke. A long silence. Somewhere near the back, one person says, gently, "aw," and it carries, and it lands, and it will be repeated.
24	The Pigeon. A pigeon, minding its own honest business, chooses the single worst possible instant to take flight directly into the rider's face, and the resulting full-body flail of panic and feathers takes out their line, their board, and two entirely innocent crewmates who were just standing there. The pigeon is completely fine. The pigeon is, if anything, emboldened.
25	The Slow-Motion Collapse. Everything is going perfectly right up until it very gradually isn't: one wheel develops a wobble, then the other, then the board, then the whole rider, in a slow, dignified, entirely unstoppable topple that everyone present watches coming from a mile off and nobody, including the rider, can do a single thing to prevent. It takes about four full seconds. It feels like four years.
26	The Wardrobe Malfunction. Their hood catches a gust and blows fully over their eyes at the precise worst moment, and they ride out the remainder of the line completely, helplessly blind, straight into a bin, at speed, screaming a muffled war cry that becomes a muffled apology on impact. They emerge wearing the bin lid like a hat. They keep it. It suits the vibe now.
31	The Backfire. They tag aggressively over a rival's piece to disrespect it, and accidentally make it significantly better, their sneering addition somehow completing the composition, elevating the whole thing into something genuinely great. The rival crew arrives, braced for war, sees it, and nods, slowly, sincerely, moved. "That's actually," one of them starts, and can't finish. Now they're friends. It's mortifying.
32	The Sympathy Wince. They don't even crash, not really, they just land so awkwardly, so jarringly, so bone-in-the-wrong-place wrong, that the entire crowd goes "ooh" in one long unified wince of secondhand pain, which is, somehow, worse than a real wipeout, because now everyone's checking if they're okay instead of being impressed, and they have to keep saying they're fine, they're fine, they're fine.
33	The Handstand Nope. They go for the handstand grind, get exactly one hand down onto the rail, and in that instant understand, with total clarity, that this was a mistake, before folding gently sideways off the rail into a convenient bush with a rustle, a sigh, and a long thoughtful pause during which they reconsider several life choices from inside the shrubbery.
34	The Runaway Board. They bail early, and their board, freed of them, continues on without its rider and rides out the entire trick absolutely flawlessly, grinding the rail, clearing the gap, landing clean, coasting to a graceful stop, while its former passenger lies on the ground and watches their own board succeed magnificently at the thing they just failed. The board is fine. The board didn't need them. That's the hard part.
35	The Permanent Record. They grind straight through a patch of fresh concrete, leaving a flawless, permanent, deeply detailed trail of exactly where they went, complete with a perfect impression of their wheels and, at the end, a full body-shaped print of the crash. It will still be there in ten years. Talos loves a map. Kids will visit it. It becomes, over time, a genuinely fond local landmark, which somehow makes it worse.
36	The Immovable Object. They crash, at full committed speed, into the one thing in the entire plaza that will not move: a small, ancient grandmother, who does not fall, does not flinch, does not even spill her coffee, but does, with the calm of a woman who has survived far worse, hit them repeatedly with her handbag until they apologise, and then until they apologise properly, and then a bit more for luck.
41	The Echo. They drop something loud at the worst possible moment and the whole block hears it, turns as one to look, and gets to watch them stand there, frozen, and try to physically pretend with their face and body that the extremely obvious crash was a deliberate artistic choice. It was not. Everyone knows it was not. They commit to the lie anyway, which is, honestly, its own kind of brave.
42	The Cascade. They knock one small thing, which knocks another, which brings down an entire wall of stacked crates, then the scaffolding, then a rack of cans, in a domino run so long, so loud, and so thorough that the watching crowd, after the initial shock, starts a slow appreciative clap for the sheer scale of it. By the end they're getting a standing ovation for the biggest accident of the year.
43	The Split. They attempt a jump that requires their legs to do something legs are not, anatomically, willing to do, and land in the world's most ambitious involuntary splits, freezing there, flat on the ground, wide-eyed, perfectly still, silently and comprehensively reconsidering their entire relationship with gravity, ambition, and their own hip flexors, while nobody quite knows whether to laugh or call somebody.
44	The Sprinklers. Their stunt trips a fire alarm and the whole area gets a sudden, cold, indoor downpour, ruining their fresh paint, soaking their gear, and drowning the moment stone dead, while they stand there in the artificial rain, arms slightly out, looking up at the ceiling with the specific, wounded expression of someone who feels personally betrayed by architecture.
45	The Wrong Crew. They pull up hard, chest out, ready to show off in front of what they think is a soft rival crew, and it is, on closer and increasingly nervous inspection, a completely different, much larger, much scarier crew who were having a nice quiet night. There is a pause. Then there is a great deal of very fast, very sincere apologising, and a strategic, dignity-free exit at speed.
46	The Anticlimax. They build up the biggest trick of the entire night, the whole scene gathers, phones rise, a hush falls, the tension climbs and climbs and climbs, and then they just, can't. They look at it. They look at the crowd. They wave it off with a small embarrassed gesture. The crowd disperses in total silence. It is, in its own way, the most devastating thing that can happen to a rider, and everyone will remember it.
51	The Boomerang. They throw a can to a crewmate, miss badly, and the can ricochets off something and comes straight back to hit them squarely in the head. As they reel from that, it bounces off the ground and hits them a second time, in a different, somehow more humiliating spot. The crewmate they threw it to has, wisely, already left. There is no crewmate. There is only the can, and it is winning.
52	The Big Reveal. Mid-run their mask, hood, or scarf comes fully, catastrophically off, and now the entire street knows exactly what they look like, which turns out to be, more than anything else, deeply and visibly embarrassed. They freeze. Everyone sees the face. The face knows everyone can see it. Somewhere, a Talos camera zooms in with what can only be described as delight, and files it away.
53	The Loyal Idiot. A crewmate, seeing them struggle, charges in uninvited to "help" with the trick in the loudest and least useful way conceivable, and successfully converts a small recoverable stumble into a full two-person pile-up, which then takes out a third crewmate who was standing well clear and had nothing to do with any of it. Three riders, one small mistake, total collapse. The helper is so proud. The helper meant so well.
54	The Overcorrect. They feel a tiny wobble and fix it with such sudden, violent, wildly disproportionate enthusiasm that they launch themselves clean off the board sideways, arms windmilling, directly into a market stall, a hedge, or a startled busker who was mid-song and now is not, and whose hat, full of coins, goes everywhere, adding a shimmering financial dimension to the disaster.
55	The Photo Finish. A Vivid promo drone catches their wipeout in perfect, pitiless high definition and beams it live to the enormous screen in the square, in crisp slow motion, on a seamless loop, with a jaunty little corporate jingle playing underneath. The crowd watches the loop. Then watches it again. The rider watches themselves fall, forever, twelve metres tall, set to music, and has to just, stand there, and take it.
56	The Stuck Nozzle. Their can jams wide open and refuses to stop, spraying a thin, useless, wandering line absolutely everywhere except where they want it, hissing at them accusingly the entire time, coating their hands, their sleeves, and eventually, as they fumble it, their own shoes, until the whole can empties itself in protest and they are left holding a spent, dripping, deeply judgmental piece of metal.
61	The Unfinished Symphony. They pull the tarp for the big dramatic unveiling of their masterpiece, and it is smudged, dripping, and visibly half-finished because they ran out of time and gambled that nobody would look too closely, and now everyone is looking very closely, at a piece that is fifty percent genius and fifty percent panicked blank wall, and the tarp is on the ground, and it can't go back on.
62	The Victory Slip. They land the trick clean, survive the hard part, step off the board to take a well-earned bow, and immediately slip on their own dropped can, going down harder, louder, and far more embarrassingly than they ever could have on the actual stunt, which they nailed, which nobody will remember, because they will only remember the bow.
63	The Dog. A junkyard dog, a guard's mutt, or a single deeply committed pigeon decides, without warning or apparent reason, that the rider's leg is the enemy, and chases them off their own line, out of the spot, and clean down the street, the rider still gamely riding the whole time, going faster than they ever managed on purpose, screaming, pursued, and, technically, doing an incredible run.
64	The Miscount. They line up a jump, misjudge the gap by a genuinely comical margin, and end up dangling off a ledge by their fingertips while their own crew stands above them, looking down, openly and at length debating whether to help them up or film it first. They film it first. Of course they film it first. They are still filming it as they eventually, reluctantly, reach down.
65	The Callback. Whatever specific thing they loudly mocked another crew for doing last time, the exact fall, the exact fumble, they now do themselves, worse, in front of that same crew, who remember, who remember perfectly, and who are, to a person, absolutely delighted, and who will bring this up at every single meeting, truce, and Style War for the rest of recorded time.
66	The Total Wipeout. Everything that can possibly go wrong goes wrong, all at once, in a flawless sequence, in front of the biggest crowd of the entire night: the crash, then the stall, then the paint, then the dog, then the drone, then the grandmother, then the jingle, a full symphony of catastrophe so complete, so perfectly orchestrated, so magnificently doomed that it goes viral for entirely the wrong reasons and becomes legend. Buy them a drink after. They earned that too, and they will need it.

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