📣 LFG: The Liberican Narratives
A Dark Folkloric Fantasy Americana using the Dungeons & Durgons system (3.5e/PF1 hybrid with narrative upgrades): This ain’t swords & sorcery. It’s gunbows & thaumaturgy.
❝If Deadwood took place in a shattered spell-union, if The Witcher were written by Cormac McCarthy, and if Old Gods of Appalachia ruled a dying frontier... you’d get a taste of Liberica.❞
🦅 Welcome to Liberica
A folkloric, postbellum fantasy-Americana setting stitched together from a prefederated union of wildly different proprietorships — each its own genre-bent frontier:
Old Marginia — Weird West meets Dark Americana: outlaw-states, haunted hollers, relic-fueled frontier wars, and thunderbird gods with a new colonist clergy.
Raskanova — slavic-necromantic Alaska where frostbitten warlocks barter with the dead.
The Aubshires — changeling-haunted New England, steeped in fae courts and colonial folklore.
Yom Marais Cantons — voodoo Haiti by way of New Orleans, where ranid loa walk openly in slime-slick streets.
Techago Mills — scavenger-tech city-state built from the wreckage of a crashed time-ship.
Coventry — Anne Hutchinson’s Rhode Island, if she’d been a witch from the Salem Trials, and the procuress of a state-sanctioned brothel.
The Sower Plantations — Deep South horror where kudzu, Wild Woses, and stranger crops feed on more than soil.
The Catascadian Seaboard — Pacific Northwest, where flood-sunk towns hide Lovecraftian piscichthyeans beneath gray waters.
Nu’ Harc’ — magical mafioso families as capitalist oligarchies, running New York like a cabalistic syndicate.
Gossa Minora — New Mexico if it were a hive of spiderfolk primed for a neo–neo-Mexican-American War — Aragog meets Aranea.
*And many more — every province its own strange story. This ain’t just swords & sorcery. It’s gunbows & thaumaturgy, witch-gospels & stormfire, ghosts that remember what we did — and every road leads somewhere stranger.
🧝 You might play as:
A Freeforged war-mech seeking personhood in a land of veterans and vendettas
A sasquatch druid planting ghost-forests where the war once scorched
A ballistoleer with stormfire bonded to a dead god’s last breath
A witch-whore using wombcraft and gospel to hex her way free
A reformed monster seeking absolution in a gladiatorial megadungeon called DUNGEONALIA
⚙️ System & Style
System: Dungeons & Durgons — my homebrew remix of 3.5e/Pathfinder with cinematic mechanics, integrative design, and story-centric realism
Format: Roll20 + Discord Voice
Cadence: Weekly or Biweekly (flexible)
Tone: Dungeonepunk Colonies vs Fantastic Frontier
Themes: Moral tension, haunting legacy, and the metaphysics of war
🧱 Current Arc: The Lost Dweomer Mine
A cursed megadungeon beneath a ghost town on the edge of an indigenous frontier. Formerly a battlefield. Now a bloodsport arena. Adventurers dig for power, absolution, or answers—unearthing buried gods, war machines, and forbidden technologies. Expect:
Political sabotage & moral quicksand
Boss monsters forged from trauma & ideology
Haunted loot with metaphysical consequences
Narrative Quick-Time Events & player-driven arcs
Ghosts that remember what we did
🛠 Dungeons & Durgons Core Pillars
🎭 Balance between Simulation and Storytelling
Rules breathe the same air as narrative. Mechanics are tuned to feel like fiction — every roll feeds a story beat, not a spreadsheet.
🗣 Ample Roleplaying Opportunities
Integrated Waveform pacing ensures downtime, discovery, and moral tension alternate naturally with combat. Every Skill, Affliction, and Troop morale check can become a character moment.
👁 Custom Afflictions (Haunted, Fleshwarped, Violated)
Afflictions replace simple “conditions” with story arcs — mechanical penalties plus evolving behavioral traits. Each affliction can be purged, embraced, or weaponized.
⚔️ Dynamic Combat Maneuvers (Opposed Rolls)
Maneuvers use contested rolls rather than static DCs (CMM vs CMD), turning every grapple, trip, and disarm into a live cinematic duel.
💰 20+ Treasure Types — All World-Connected
From Magitech to Stratagems, every loot category carries Origin, Effect, and Lore Tether. Treasures aren’t currency—they’re story catalysts.
🧱 Troop Rules for Mass Combat
Troop templates abstract dozens of enemies into a single morale-driven unit, feeding the Warwrought subsystem. Troop morale, formation, and burst actions create war-scenes that still feel intimate.
🏰 Megadungeon Infrastructure and Dungeoneering Rules
The Wandering Clock and Waveform systems pace exploration, while Jaquaying and Xandering ensure looping, believable ecology in every dungeon.
🐘 Feats and Flaws (Elephant in the Room Patch)
Streamlined, choice-rich feats eliminate “taxes” while preserving uniqueness. Flaws and Afflictions replace alignment as moral economy.
🧭 Expansive Skills for Exploration and Investigation
25 skills across 6 categories (Physical, Social, Technical, Knowledge, Creation, Survival) emphasize agency over class restrictions. Investigation and Create have subsystem depth equal to combat.
🗣️ Backstory Incorporation
Backstory isn’t static—it’s a mechanical anchor for Afflictions, Feats, and QTEs. Your past modifies your rolls when thematically relevant.
💀 Action-Oriented Monsters
Every creature acts like a set piece: Cinematic Actions, Reaction Beats, Narrative Wound Stages, and Tactical AI. They feel alive, even when dying.
⚔️ Single Combat Duels
The Duelist Protocol enables cinematic one-on-one fights using morale tempo and CMM parries — perfect for rivalries and climaxes.
✨ Toggleable Metamagic
Spellcasters may “toggle” metamagic in battle like stances—raising tension and burning through arcane stamina rather than slot bloat.
🎨 25 Skills (Skill-Based Crafting / Creation)
A flat skill chassis means any hero can innovate. Crafting, investigation, and social leverage grow from player ingenuity, not class gates.
*No homework. Just immersion.
🧠 WHO THIS IS FOR
This is a high-concept, narrative-forward, theme-rich game meant for players who enjoy:
Telling a damn good stories, not just “playing through content”
Creative backstories with cultural grounding
Exploring political/cultural/moral tension through fantasy
Deep lore and cinematic moments
Player agency and personal arcs
Love deep lore and thematic worldbuilding
Want to roleplay with stakes, not just "perform"
*Bonus if you're:
Into folklore, horror, speculative fiction, Southern mythology, or animist weirdness
A writer, artist, performer, or just a lover of dramatic fiction
Familiar with TTRPGs (especially d20), but open to a custom system and new paradigms
🚫 Not a Fit If:
You expect rules-lawyering to override narrative flow
You don’t like collaborative storytelling or character growth
You’re here just to win, optimize, or "get through the dungeon"
Warning: We’re all adults here. Expect some dark themes, mature topics, moral ambiguity, and heavy metaphors that must be handled with creative curiosity not condemnation. You don’t need to be a rules expert, but you do need to engage with the story.
👤 About Me (Your DM)
I’m a neurodivergent psych nurse with an English degree, 15+ years of GMing, and a storytelling style that blends Faulkner, Final Fantasy, and Manly Wade Wellman. My games are strange, southern-gothic, and spiritually volatile. I write worlds where the moon bleeds eggs, ghosts are registered voters, and war never ends—it just changes gods.
🎲 Interested? We play Sundays @ 6PM (Central Time Zone)
Send me a message with:
Your age, time zone, and general availability
Your playstyle preferences (roleplay, tactics, exploration, etc.)
A rough concept for a character you'd like to play
Your favorite piece of American folklore, horror, or weird fiction