Electric Eden

Every folk song ends in tragedy. The deserter hangs, the maiden drowns, Sweet William dies of sorrow. What if you could change that?

Electric Eden is a lightweight TTRPG where you play time-traveling interlopers crashing into crystallized folk narratives at the crucial moment before they become fixed in tradition. Armed with dice and terrible ideas, you'll attempt to save the innocent, fix injustices, or just see what happens if Lord Donald doesn't kill Matty Groves this time.

What's Inside:

• Complete rules using the Lasers & Feelings framework (half-page to explain, 30 seconds to understand)
• The Eden/Electric axis: Choose between preserving tradition or burning it all down
• NPC awareness system - because after 300 years, even the villains are tired of their roles
• The Folknet threat - tradition itself as an AI desperately maintaining canonical versions
• Sample interventions for classic ballads you definitely know
• Designer's notes explaining why we did this to folk music

Features:

• Shopping trolleys positioned on ley lines (wait, wrong game)
• NPCs with bunions who refuse to perform their tragic endings
• Recursive time loops where your fixes become someone else's problems
• The horrible realization that you ARE the folk process
• Full Peabody & Sherman energy throughout

The Game Experience: Think Quantum Leap meets the Child Ballads meets that Victorian cartoon in Cecil Sharp House mocking transportation ballads. Your interventions might save Barbara Allen or doom the entire tradition. The recruiting sergeant remembers all seventeen times you've tried to save the Deserter. The Devil is considering early retirement.

Perfect For:

• People who can explain the difference between Fairport Convention's and Steeleye Span's arrangement of "Tam Lin"
• Anyone who thinks "Scarborough Fair" is passive-aggressive
• Players who understand that tradition is whatever we say it is
• That person at the session who keeps making anime references during medieval settings
• The five people who will actually play this

Not a Real Game: This is a thought experiment dressed as a TTRPG, a theoretical framework for breaking things that were already broken. We made it because someone had to. You'll download it, read it, go "huh," and three years later make something 40% inspired by it about K-pop or something.

Credits: Created by The Grey Ledger Society + CGCG Helix

Inspired by Rob Young's "Electric Eden," every folk revival that went too far, and that one person who definitely tried to save the Deserter but made everything worse.

Released under CC BY-SA 4.0. Steal it, mutate it, make it electric. No gods, no masters, no definitive versions.

"Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1673. We're going to fix 'Barbara Allen'!"