Yanping Fulsome died a martyr. I met him in the park, just after he had just beaten an amateur magician to death for his position on electoral reform, and our camaraderie was immediate and firm. His talents as a locksmith were invaluable, and together we were the voice and hands of the liberal revolution: a silver tongue and ten dexterous fingers, capable of luring almost anyone to our side and stealing the rest overnight.
But we got sloppy. Yanping took one on his left arm while robbing a downtown apartment block (liberally). An ultra-conservative construction worker stayed home that day and raised eyebrows when he noticed Yanping stuffing his pockets with jewelry and iPads. It was a matter of minutes before the DethSquad officers showed up.
Neither Yanping’s 9mm pistol nor his bodyguard Rane (a black belt martial artist I flirted with so much he committed himself to a life of terrorism) could stand up to them. Rane went down first, and Yanping – soft and sentimental Yanping – wasted time dragging her body to the elevator before succumbing to her injuries, one button away from escape. I replaced him with a 46-year-old football coach named Donovan. Donovan sells pot brownies to further the cause instead of dying in an elevator shaft. In fact, we’re making more money now.
We need a slogan!
This is Liberal Crime Squad (LCS), the little-discussed predecessor game from the developers behind Dwarf Fortress. A revolutionary board simulator that tasks you with implementing the Liberal Agenda through assassination, sabotage, kidnapping and theft, LCS differs from Dwarf Fortress in that it truly has an objective in mind. Your task is essentially to make all of Glenn Beck’s nightmares come true at once.
By any means necessary, you have to build a vast liberal conspiracy, building a spider’s web of activists across the country who will stop at nothing to ensure that gays can marry and flags can be burned, undermining tradition for subtle and overt means. Sometimes that means kidnapping a judge and bending him to your will. Other times it means, uh, making and selling tie-dye shirts. Hey, the Bolsheviks sold postcards (opens in new tab). Sometimes the revolution is about arts and crafts.
You won’t do it alone, of course. You are aided in this by your recruits, acquired by seduction and persuasion, who are divided into “active” liberals and sleeper agents embedded in the crucial interstices of conservative society, ready to wreak havoc whenever you send a message.
You’re opposed by, well, pretty much everyone else in the world. The police, the state, even public radio are all facing the story and yelling “Stop,” which means you have to be smart. By placing your sleepers in these institutions (and others), you can get advance warning of police raids, be saved from a courtroom jam, and even start subtly spreading liberal ideology over the airwaves, if you dare.
You could end up in a situation where John Q. Public is willing to burn down an animal testing facility, but thinks executing humans for minor infractions is OK.
It’s satire, of course, heralding a political era – the early 2000s – when the most radical center-left voice in the eyes of the American public was Jon Stewart. The idea of people as milquetoast as the mainstream liberals of 2004 forming some sort of New York Times Baader-Meinhof Group was patently preposterous at the time, even if the idea of radicals and indelicate political action from the left is easier to imagine in 2023.
It is a complex simulation and models multiple layers of public opinion and political power. You’re not just pushing a ‘liberal popularity’ meter one way or another, you’re impacting what people think about a range of issues individually. There’s the presidential approval rating, of course, which you either want to keep high or send down to Earth, depending on the ideology of the person in power, but people have their views on issues too.
Focus narrowly on acts of sabotage and activism around animal rights, for example, and you could end up in a situation where John Q. Public is willing to burn down an animal testing facility but thinks executing human beings for minor infractions it’s OK. So it’s pretty realistic is what I’m saying.
Wither liberalism?
LCS is a crude and finite thing compared to the wild expansion of Dwarf Fortress, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Once upon a time, the LCS was the go-to recommendation for newcomers looking to get into Tarn and Zach Adams’ beloved dwarf management game: a way to delve into the strange waters of an ASCII-heavy, barely navigable game without having to monitor granularity level systems ‘my chicken’s left knee is wet’.
But Dwarf Fortress has a graphical Steam version with (something like a) tutorial now, meaning that learning this game is probably best accomplished by playing it. But does this mean that the Liberal Agenda will be set aside?
Bay 12 stopped working in the LCS almost immediately after its first public release in 2004, so you could say it’s been languishing for a while now, but the cause has been taken up by a dedicated body of fans. The version I’ve been playing is King Drake’s Liberal Crime Squad (opens in new tab) (which adds an opposing conservative crime squad that uses their own tactics against you) but there are others you can find on the LCS wiki (opens in new tab)including a fan-made graphic remake (opens in new tab) if you just can’t stand the charm of the ASCII version.
I suspect the game still has some life left, and it might even see a surge of interest after the incredible success of the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress, but I’d hate to see it wither now that it no longer works as a set. training wheels for its successor game. I guess what I’m saying is, Kitfox, you’ve done it once and you can do it again. We’re going to get an improved version of the LCS on Steam, ideally with input from the open source developers that keep it running all the time. Do it for the revolution, comrades.