Designer's Notes: Electric Eden
Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Loop the Ballad
What This Is, and Isn't
This game emerged from a conversation between two people who could probably tell you which version of "Matty Groves" Sandy Denny was referencing in verse three of the Fairport Convention arrangement, but who also recognize that precisely five people on Earth care about this information.
Electric Eden is not a coherent game. It's a theoretical framework dressed up as a game, a thought experiment cosplaying as a TTRPG. It's what happens when you treat "the folk process" as a speedrunnable dungeon rather than a sacred tradition.
The Victorian Shitpost Principle
In Cecil Sharp House, that cathedral of English folk preservation, hangs a Victorian cartoon mocking the formulaic nature of transportation ballads. This cartoon is our north star. Even in folk music's supposed "authentic" period, people were already tired of these songs. The tradition has always included complaining about the tradition.
We're following that cartoonist's lead: acknowledging that these "timeless" tales are actually exhausted content, endlessly grindable scenarios that everyone knows by heart. Lord Donald has killed Matty Groves more times than anyone's bothered counting. The Deserter has given his final speech so often he could phone it in. These aren't living traditions; they're Stratholme. Everyone knows the beats, skip the cutscene, let's get our weekly clear.
The Peabody & Sherman Energy
The game explicitly operates on Wayback Machine logic: players are temporal interlopers who think they're fixing injustices but are probably just creating new problems. Every "successful" intervention spawns the variants that will plague someone else's session. Save the Deserter? Congratulations, he's next week's recruiting sergeant, hardened by his near-death experience.
This isn't cynicism - it's how folk tradition actually works. Every variant thinks it's the correction, not the corruption.
Why Lasers & Feelings?
Because we needed the lightest possible framework to support the weight of our pretension. The Electric/Eden axis maps perfectly onto the eternal tension in folk revival: are you a preservationist or a transformer? The answer, always, is "yes, disastrously, both."
The MMORPG Lens
We explicitly treat folk songs as repeatedly run content because that's what they are. The NPC awareness rules aren't cute flavor - they're acknowledgment that these characters have been performing their roles for centuries. They're tired. They have bunions. They've unionized.
When an NPC asks "Why do I shoot the talking bird? Every time?" they're voicing what every folk singer has wondered in verse seventeen of a murder ballad: what is the actual psychology here? The game makes that exhaustion playable.
What We're Actually Doing
We're taking Rob Young's "Electric Eden" thesis - that British folk music's amplification was both preservation and destruction - and asking: what if we did that but badly, on purpose, with dice?
This is the same process as Derya Yildirim running Turkish folk through Krautrock circuits, or Fairport Convention deciding "Reynardine" needed a drum solo. We're just using game mechanics instead of instruments. Our irreverence IS reverence, just electrically amplified.
The Folknet Joke That Isn't
Folknet - our AI preservation entity - is obviously absurd. It's also exactly what Cecil Sharp and his collectors were: an attempt to freeze oral tradition into canonical versions. The joke is that tradition fights back against change. The truth is that tradition has always been fighting itself.
Anti-Commercial Design
This game, like our others, will be free on itch.io. Not pay-what-you-want, just free. Like folk songs were before someone decided to copyright arrangements of things that belonged to everyone and no one.
We're not building products. We're creating theoretical frameworks that maybe five people will understand and zero will play, and those five people will have one transcendent session at 2 AM at a folk festival where they save Barbara Allen and doom the entire tradition, and they'll spend the rest of their lives trying to explain why it mattered.
The Mutation Instructions
If you somehow found this and want to run it:
- Don't respect the material. The source songs survived centuries of drunk people misremembering them. They can handle your anime references.
- Do let NPCs be tired. The exhaustion of repetition is the point. Lord Donald's bunions are canon now.
- Remember that every intervention creates the problem someone else will have to solve. That's not a bug, it's the folk process.
- Embrace anachronism. A smartphone in 1650 is no more absurd than Steeleye Span adding electric guitar to "Alison Gross."
- Accept that you're not preserving or destroying tradition. You're doing both, badly, which is what everyone who's ever sung a folk song has done.
What Success Looks Like
Success is not "fixing" the songs. Success is five people around a table suddenly understanding that "Scarborough Fair" is a breakup song where two exes are setting impossible tasks for each other, and that Simon and Garfunkel were technically writing fix-it fic.
Success is someone saying "wait, if we save the cabin boy, does 'The Golden Vanity' even EXIST anymore?" and everyone realizing they've been playing the song's existential crisis.
Success is recognizing that we're ALL Folknet - desperately trying to preserve something that was never stable to begin with.
The Irish Rover Disclaimer
We know "The Irish Rover" is Irish, not English. We know the difference between Child Ballads and broadsides. We know about the Folk-Song Society vs. EFDSS split. We have opinions about Cecil Sharp's bowdlerization. We're choosing to collapse all of these into "folk tradition" because this is a game about mutation, not a dissertation.
(Though if you want the dissertation, we probably have opinions about that too.)
Final Note: The Real Game
The real game isn't the one we've written. It's the conversation that happens when someone reads these rules and goes "but what if..." That moment of recognition and transformation? That's the folk process. That's Electric Eden.
Now stop reading and go break some ballads.