Give Me Liberty: A Cyberpunk Revolution Quest

"Give me liberty or give me death" - Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775​

It is 2030, and the United States survives mostly as a memory people cling to when the nights run long. The stars and stripes still hang above government buildings and recruitment kiosks, but the flag has become little more than a logo, printed on Militech ads, stamped onto corporate armor, and worn by mercenaries who treat patriotism as a marketing angle. The colors remain bright, though the meaning behind them has faded to a dim echo.

What used to be a union of fifty states has crumbled into a patchwork of breakaway territories and privatized realms. Washington insists it still commands the continent, yet its reach rarely extends beyond the flight path of its gunships and the walls of its cities. Past those lines, the country dissolves into something unrecognizable. Out west, skeletal cities lean against the horizon, ruled by boardrooms and oligarchs. The South bends under corporate warlords who pretend loyalty to D.C. The Midwest, once the engine of American industry, sits abandoned beneath a haze of smog and drifting dust, its dead factories rising like half-buried monuments.

The federal government continues only through habit. The Executive Branch operates from a Militech boardroom draped in patriotic cloth. Congress performs for the cameras, reading scripts disguised as bills. Courts stamp approvals on whatever the corporations slide across their desks. Justice functions as a subscription service now, priced and packaged with all the warmth of a software update.

The country hadn’t always carried this stink of rot. It once shone with industry and ambition, a place driven by invention and the stubborn belief that tomorrow would be better. People worked, dreamed, argued, doubted, but they believed. But that belief began to break when the "Gang of Four," a cabal of intelligence officials tucked inside the machinery of government, twisted markets and policy to achieve their own goals. Their schemes collided with rising global tensions, and when their corruption surfaced the international community slammed the door shut. Sanctions and embargoes crushed the nation in 1994, and the economy folded in on itself.

The Crash of ’94 as it was called didn’t merely shake markets; it gutted the modern world. Overnight, the global system flatlined. Pensions evaporated, banks folded like cheap furniture, and entire cities dimmed as skyscrapers went black. Crowds starved, then turned desperate, then violent. The streets were filled with firelight and broken glass. Once the violence burned itself down to embers, sickness swept through the makeshift camps gathered around every dying metropolis. Disease pulled tens of millions into the grave, the final blow in a season of catastrophe.

Desperation pushed America to pawn off its future. Investors from across the Pacific descended with sharp smiles and deeper pockets, snatching up everything of value, ports, banks, infrastructure, small-town lifeblood, until nothing meaningful remained in public hands. Arasaka took the lead, coating every acquisition with soft language about "stability" and "recovery." The dollar lost all value over the years and by the time the Eurodollar replaced the greenback, the old sense of sovereignty had vanished without ceremony.

The 2000s dragged on with the weight of slow decay. Washington kept its rituals, but genuine authority had migrated to magnates and crooked officials who answered to no voter. When the Second Central American Conflict erupted the administration branded it a fight against cartels, though anyone paying attention understood the truth. It was a last frantic ploy by the Gang of Four to hold onto influence and snatch new territory. Private forces marched into the tropics wearing American insignias, collecting bodies and contracts in equal measure. Back home the map began to tear. Texas walked out. California shattered into rival free zones. The Great Plains drifted into lawlessness, claimed by nomad caravans, mercenary outfits, and corporate strongholds, each building something new from the bones of the old nation.

The Fourth Corporate War arrived like a lightning strike. Arasaka and Militech turned the world into their battlefield, launching strikes from orbit and corrupting entire networks in the span of minutes. Cities worldwide vanished under bombardment or collapsed after data strikes twisted their infrastructure into useless knots. When a nuclear blast tore through Night City, any lingering illusion of federal authority crumbled. Washington stood hollow. The economy imploded once more, and from the wreckage rose a new banner: the New United States of America. A republic by name alone, run at its core by the corporation that had propped it upright.

During the chaos, the DataKrash ripped through the old Net. In 2022, a rogue AI, unleashed by a single determined hacker, devoured systems without hesitation. Code rotted mid-stream. Economies faltered. Users died with their minds trapped inside decaying architecture. When the storm of corrupted data finally subsided the Net was sealed behind the Blackwall, an electronic tomb built to contain the ghosts inside. What remained of the world felt smaller, meaner, ruled by whoever held the servers. In that moment, the idea of America seemed to evaporate, erased not by weapons but by a cold dispassionate message blinking on screens everywhere: CONNECTION TIMED OUT.

By 2030, the NUSA governs through an unblinking network of drones, informants, and financial chokeholds. The Eastern Corridor, stretching from Boston to D.C., shines with chrome towers and neon reflections, its skies patrolled by machines. Beyond the Mississippi sprawls the wreck of the old republic, a place where might makes right and every highway twists toward danger. Even inside the so-called safe zones, order feels brittle, held together by choking contracts and the uneasy promise of corporate protection. Democracy only truly exists in stories told by drunks and parents trying to explain a vanished world.

You grew up inside this broken landscape.

Your birth fell somewhere in the early years of the millennium, when a faint trace of hope still clung to the air. Childhood offered a front-row seat to the unraveling of a dream, the "land of the free" reduced to a marketplace where flesh, data, and the illusion of security had set prices. Yet the stories lingered. Tales of people who once believed freedom belonged to everyone, not just the wealthy or the connected.

Most folks chase upgrades, money, or distraction, losing themselves in the noise. You don’t. Your gaze drifts backward, toward the old promise, toward the idea that once mattered more than profit or power.

You aren’t aiming to build a new world.

You’re trying to reclaim a lost one.

Long ago, the first revolutionaries called themselves the Sons of Liberty. They stood against an empire with little more than conviction and a belief that no person should lack freedom and be bound to cruel tyrants. Their legacy still smolders in the ashes of this ruined nation, waiting for somebody reckless or hopeful enough to stir it back to life.

The truth has settled into your bones: America hasn’t died.

Not yet.

Something still waits beneath the ruins, stubborn and unresolved, and you can feel it pulling at you like a promise. A half-remembered dream begging to be woken. And the person bold, or foolish, enough to rouse it, just might be you.

So before the revolution stirs, before gunfire tears open the silence and the first lie dies under the weight of daylight, everything collapses into a single, unavoidable question.

Who are you?

Every story has a beginning, and yours starts long before the battles and the back-alley meetings. It begins with the place that raised you, the ground that held your footsteps, the voices that shaped the rhythm of your thoughts. Your home state left its fingerprints on you: in your accent, in your habits, in the way you brace yourself when trouble closes in.

And then there’s the life you lived before the cause called to you. Maybe you were running from something. Maybe you were hunting for something better. Either way, that path carved the first lines of who you became.

These decisions trace the outline of your past. They color your strengths, your faults, the skills you rely on when the world grows dangerous. They cast the long shadows that follow you into the coming struggle, shaping the person standing on the edge of this story, and hinting at the kind of leader you might grow into once the flame of revolution finally catches.

Home State: Where did you grow up in these disunited states.

[ ] Maine Maine still shows up on postcards as a place of lighthouses and quiet coves, but that image belongs to another century. Down along the coast, the old fishing towns have been eaten clean by the megacorps. Their floating plants sit offshore like metal islands, humming through the night as they churn whatever’s left in the water into something that barely resembles food. Folks say you can taste the machinery in every bite. Head inland and the world changes fast. The glow of the factories drops behind you, replaced by pines that bunch together so thick the sky disappears. Roads twist into the woods and don’t come back out, cracked apart by frost and time. Out there, little settlements hide among the trees, places without addresses, where people know each other by reputation long before they share names. A hunter might wave as you pass. Or not. Depends on the season, the weather, or whether you look worth the trouble.

[ ] Tennessee Downtown Nashville still advertises itself as "Music City," though the only folks making money off music anymore sit in sound labs on the upper floors. Producers sculpt singers the way engineers tune engines, and every chorus gets tested by more algorithms than ears. Even the street buskers sound manufactured now. Drive far enough from the city glow and Tennessee starts remembering who it used to be. Small towns climb the hills like stubborn weeds. People trade whatever they grow or weld or scrounge, chatting on porches while their radios hiss and pop with static. A few of these communities keep to themselves more than most, half-communes, half-neighbors-who-stopped-trusting-outsiders. They get by quietly, though a scout team from the Corps drift through now and then, asking questions nobody wants to answer. Those visits never bring anything but tension and a long night.

[ ] Minnesota Folks still trot out the "Land of 10,000 Lakes" line, though plenty of those lakes shine with a chemical slick that reflects the sky the wrong shade of blue. The whole state feels tired in a way the cold can’t explain. Farms stretch forever but produce almost nothing; the soil’s been stripped, the water tastes faintly metallic. Rochester sits locked down under NUSA protection. The remains of the Mayo Clinic, what’s left of it, sit behind armored zones where only the wealthy or blessed-by-a-corporate-friend gain entry. Up in the Twin Cities, the mayor acts more like a war boss than a politician, shaking hands with Militech one day, bargaining with gangs the next, all in the name of "keeping the peace." Head north and everything starts falling apart. Empty fields give way to barns collapsing under their own weight. Farmers take potshots at AgriCorp drones when they think no one’s watching. Scavenger crews roam the old grain belts searching for metal, wire, or anything else the cold hasn’t claimed yet. Nights stretch long out there. You can hear the wind whistle through silos like it’s trying to warn you.

[ ] North Carolina Most of the eastern coastline has slipped under the Atlantic. You can still see the tops of office buildings jutting from the water if you squint, like crooked tombstones in a shallow grave. Sunken highways run beneath the surface, and smugglers glide above them in patched-up skiffs, exchanging crates between half-flooded neighborhoods. Locals swear there are pirate outfits operating out of old distribution centers, though nobody agrees on how many or where they’re holed up. Move inland and the world becomes sharp and controlled. Charlotte and Raleigh gleam with mirrored towers where the Carolina Senate, part boardroom, part aristocracy, runs everything behind soundproof glass. Elections happen on schedule, but everyone knows the real decisions get made in back rooms over drinks that cost a month’s wages. Tobacco still anchors the state’s economy, though the new strains burn hotter, grow faster, and glow under UV rigs that buzz through the night. Workers move through the fields like ghosts, watching the drones overhead.

[ ] Alabama Alabama keeps a straight face when it calls itself a state, but everyone knows better. Logan Lowndes rules the place the way feudal lords used to, loudly, proudly, and with as much firepower as he can get his hands on. Dothan serves as his capital: a fortified sprawl of concrete walls, broadcast towers, and stadium-sized screens where he delivers speeches praising himself as the savior of the Heartland. Outside the city, the land cracks under a drought that never lets up. Rivers shrink every year, and whatever water remains gets funneled toward the corporate plantations. Their cotton crops stand unnaturally tall, engineered to drink more than the land can give. Entire towns fade off the maps, taken apart quietly by debt, by conscription, or by Lowndes’ enforcers. Drones buzz through the treelines like angry insects. Roadblocks appear where they weren’t yesterday. In the fields, the cotton glows pale as old bone, and the people picking it seldom bother pretending they have hope left.

[ ] New Mexico New Mexico doesn’t bother hiding its scars. The collapse hit hard and left most of the state stripped to its bones. Highways crumble into dust, signs twist in the heat, and the desert keeps swallowing whatever refuses to move. Albuquerque hangs on, a loud, dusty crossroads where caravans and nomad rigs park shoulder to shoulder under the broken skyline. Fifty thousand people hustle for scrap, trade, repairs, anything that keeps them fed until the next sandstorm rolls in. The smell of welding, dust, and chili peppers mixes in the air, and arguments carry down the old streets like they’re part of the weather. Up north, the Unified American Nation holds together with quiet determination. Tribes and free towns banded together after everything went to hell, choosing to guard their land the old way, by knowing it better than anyone else. Their settlements sit tucked beneath the mesas, the kind of places outsiders find only after they’ve already been spotted. Between the UAN and Albuquerque stretches a desert so wide silence becomes a kind of company. Shattered solar farms glitter across the sand, and rusted wind turbines lean in the heat. The horizon looks endless out there. People joke it’s where the world gives up trying.

**Lifepath:**Who were you before the revolution called you?

[ ] Corpo You grew up beneath glass towers that never stopped reflecting the sky back at itself. Down in the plazas, the air always smelled faintly filtered, the kind of clean that comes from machines, not trees. Your childhood was a tight schedule of curated feeds, biometric lessons, and polite little phrases drilled into your head by tutors who smiled too much. You climbed fast, of course you did. That’s what happens to kids born into the right floors of the right buildings. Friends used to joke you’d be running a division before you were old enough to drink, and they weren’t that far off. You learned early how circles talk: soft voices, sharp smiles, threats bundled in compliments. Meetings felt like knife fights done with contracts instead of steel. Eventually you started noticing the things they didn’t want you to see. The projects scrubbed from the ledgers. The workers replaced overnight. The way people vanished after asking the wrong question. A friend once told you, half laughing, "Don’t stare too long behind the curtain, you won’t like the view." Turned out they were right. You walked away carrying more secrets than they’re comfortable knowing you remember.

[ ] Streetkid Your story started in the parts of town where the streetlights flicker like they’re thinking about quitting. Above you, broken billboards leaned over alleys crowded with steam and patched cables. Neon signs were the closest thing you had to stars, buzzing all night, painting you in colors that didn’t exist anywhere else. The city taught you fast. You picked up the rhythm of trouble, the way a gang’s boots hit the sidewalk when they weren’t in the mood to negotiate, or the low buzz of a surveillance drone drifting too close. You didn’t learn to run; you learned to dodge. Friends ribbed you for the way you could read someone’s whole mood in a glance, but it kept you breathing, so no one complained. You watched armored limos sweep past, carrying people who lived in a different world entirely. They never looked down. Cops only showed up when the situation was already lost. The streets might’ve roughed you up, but they never lied to you. And in their own way, they taught you pride, thin, stubborn, and impossible to stamp out. Someone once told you that surviving down there was a talent. You shrugged and said, "Nah. Just practice."

[ ] Nomad Home wasn’t a house, it was wherever the convoy parked for the night. You grew up with engines humming nearby and sand brushing against the trailer door. Some seasons you crossed plains so wide the sky felt like it could swallow the world. Other years you pushed through dust storms that erased whole towns from the map. You learned to fix an engine before you learned to hold a pencil, and no one thought that strange. People in the cities whisper all kinds of things about nomads: scavengers, raiders, wanderers. They talk like you’re myths, as though they half expect you to vanish when the headlights pass. They don’t see the truth of it, the shared work, the quiet mornings, the way your people look out for each other because no one else will. Around the fire, someone always had a story, and someone always had your back. You’ve walked through the skeletons of cities and heard the wind whistle through towers left hollow after the collapse. You know how heavy silence can feel when you’re days from the next settlement. A friend once joked that nomads are too stubborn to die. You laughed and said, "It’s not stubbornness. It’s survival. Difference matters."

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How Vote Will Work,

This is a line vote, so just vote like this

[ ] Home State:

[ ] Lifepath:

Make sure you have what item you are voting for, not just the choice. I may not count [X] Corpo, but I will 100% count [X] Lifepath: Corpo

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Well hello there it is your 13th favorite habitual quest starter Hydro here, welcome to the Redux of Sons of Liberty, I decided to give it a new name to differentiate it, I may change it in the future. This quest will be very different from the original.

In the original quest you started off with a large following of young, energetic and loyal revolutionaries with an advanced base. Here you do not have that. You have a handful of hopefuls.

This quest will evolve as it goes along and the scale increases. But at the beginning you start as a "cell."

This character creation will take some time as I want to do it well, not do it fast.

Please wait to post anything until I have posted all the Informational Chapters​