Liberal Crime Squad

Liberal Crime Squad Strikes

Liberal Crime Squad is a satirical open-source text-based political RPG. You play as the founder of a left-wing insurgent cell devoted to fighting alt-right militias, the police, the military, and the corporations. You recruit a team of activists, develop their skills and build up their reputation, and then send them out to do battle with the forces of oppression. A few of the many and varied Liberal Acts you may engage in include volunteering, playing protest music, running your own underground newspaper, changing your gender, seducing right-wingers, harboring undocumented immigrants, burning the US flag, vandalism, hacking, kidnapping, torture, assassination, and dumping nuclear waste in the river to prove a point.

In Liberal Crime Squad, you play as a group of morally questionable people who have the option to do some very bad things in pursuit of their goals. Your enemies are not good people, but you might not be much better. You aren't obligated to compromise your values, but the stakes are high and it's easy to get caught up in the cause. It's up to you whether there are lines you aren't willing to cross.

LCS was originally created by Tarn and Zach Adams (Bay 12 Games), the brothers behind Dwarf Fortress. They last updated the game in 2004; I picked the source code up in 2007, and in collaboration with more than a dozen programmers and writers from the community, released intermittent updates in the following years. I stepped back from maintaining LCS for many years, but others continued to work on it. Today the game has been forked in several directions and is actively maintained by a number of different people.

In early 2024, I returned to active development and created my own fork of Liberal Crime Squad as a web port called Liberal Crime Squad: New Age. Its goals include: Making it easier to play the game regardless of your operating system, bringing the game's setting into 2020s politics rather than starting in 2008, changing some elements of the content that haven't aged particularly well, and generally being a fork for me to freely make significant updates driven by own personal vision.