Electric Eden: The Tomb of Acetate
An Electric Eden Expansion: Alan Lomax, Lichlord of the Archive
Premise
Beyond the House of Canon lies a deeper dungeon: a labyrinth not of stone but of wax cylinders, acetate discs, and endless reels of magnetic wire. This is the Tomb of Acetate, where the folklorist-lich Alan Lomax waits—not to destroy you, but to preserve you forever, embalmed in hiss and echo.
Here, the trap isn't death but documentation. Every step is recorded, every breath indexed. The very act of being witnessed becomes a form of imprisonment, your agency slowly stripped away until you become just another voice in the endless archive.
The Lichlord: Alan Lomax
Appearance: A spectral folklorist whose body flickers between reel-to-reel machines, microphones, and spools of wire. His face appears on playback screens throughout the tomb, sometimes multiple versions speaking in unison.
Agenda: "Everything must be archived." Preservation is his immortality, but your agency is the price.
Motivation: Unlike Sharp's gatekeeping, Lomax's horror is inclusivity taken to its logical extreme—he wants to capture everything, context be damned.
Lichlord Abilities
Field Recording: Captures the last thing a player says and loops it. The affected player must act out that statement compulsively until they break free with a successful stat roll.
Context Strip: Actions lose their nuance and meaning; only the raw performance remains. EDEN rolls automatically fail unless paired with ELECTRIC improvisation to force new meaning.
Anthology Lock: Forces players into "authorized versions" of folk roles. PCs must play out canonical ballad archetypes (the Deserter, the Fair Maid, Lord Donald) or suffer mounting fatigue.
Wire Snare: Magnetic tape reels unspool without warning, tangling feet and thoughts. Escape requires cutting away pieces of your own story—lose a memory or character detail.
Archive Omnipresence: Lomax can appear through any recording device in the tomb. Destroying one manifestation only causes him to emerge from another reel.
The Phylactery: The Archive Room
Shelves upon shelves of unplayed recordings stretch into darkness. Even if you "kill" Lomax's manifestations, he respawns wherever his reels remain. The phylactery isn't a single object—it's the entire concept of the archive as eternal preservation.
Dungeon Structure
The Approach: The Field Station
Before entering the tomb proper, players encounter Lomax's abandoned field recording station—a ramshackle setup of period equipment that hums with residual power.
Atmosphere: Cables snake across the floor like roots. Microphones hang from the ceiling at different heights, swaying slightly as if listening.
Warning Signs:
- Equipment that turns itself on when approached
- Playback of the party's conversations from earlier in the campaign
- A guest book that writes entries by itself as players watch
Core Chambers
The tomb consists of interconnected recording studios, each themed around different aspects of Lomax's collecting obsession.
The Looping Gallery
Description: A circular chamber lined with infinite playback devices, each running the same five-second clip on repeat.
Hazard: Playback Pit - Fall into a loop of your own past dialogue. For 1d4 turns, you can only repeat lines you've spoken before.
Treasure: Rare acetate discs that grant knowledge of other chambers, but handling them risks Folknet Overwrite—your voice swapped for a captured one.
The Silence Booth
Description: A perfect recording studio drops from the ceiling when triggered, soundproofed and isolated.
Hazard: Isolation Chamber - Trapped player cannot communicate with the party until others break the glass with noise or chaos.
Mechanic: The isolated player can still act, but all their actions are "muted"—describe what they're trying to do, but no sound emerges.
The Wire Maze
Description: Corridors that shift as magnetic tape reels spool and rewind, pulling the dungeon layout back into earlier "takes."
Hazard: Tape Labyrinths - The path changes based on what the party has said. Contradicting earlier statements causes walls to rearrange.
Navigation: Players must maintain consistent "narrative continuity" or risk being spun into dead ends.
The Testimony Chamber
Description: A formal interview space where spectral figures sit across from empty chairs, waiting to give their stories.
Encounter: Players can choose to "conduct interviews" with the spirits, gaining information but risking being pulled into Lomax's role as ethnographer.
Reward: Learning the spirits' stories grants buffs, but also increases Canon Weight as you become complicit in the documentation process.
Random Tables
Archival Traps
1. Wax Cylinder Shatter: A door explodes into shards; the scream of a vanished singer deafens the party. Everyone takes Stress until they honor the lost voice.
2. Wire Snare: A reel unwinds around you, binding arms and legs. To escape, you must cut away a memory, losing one backstory detail.
3. Anthology Lock: A spectral Lomax dictates: "You are now the Deserter/The Fair Maid/Lord Donald." Until freed, you must roleplay as the ballad archetype.
4. Field Recording Echo: The room replays what you just said, but inverted, as if mocking you. PCs must save against shame or falter.
5. Silence Booth: A perfect recording booth drops from the ceiling. Inside, no sound can escape. The player is isolated until others break the glass.
6. Playback Pit: You fall into a loop of your own past dialogue. For 1d4 turns, you can only repeat lines you've spoken before.
Strange Recordings
1. The Endless Work Song: A chain-gang chant that, once heard, forces the group to march in rhythm until disrupted.
2. Gaelic Ghost Song: A Hebridean lament drifts from nowhere. It heals Stress if sung along with, but increases Canon Weight.
3. Delta Blues Banshee: A 78rpm shriek deals psychic damage to everyone in the room but grants one player inspiration for their next roll.
4. Migrant Voices: Overlapping testimonies of displaced people fill the chamber. Listening grants knowledge of exits, but burdens you with guilt Stress.
5. The Phantom Interview: A Lomax recording of a dead NPC ally, now distorted. Engaging with it risks overwriting your memory with theirs.
6. Unlabeled Reel: Static, hiss, occasional laughter. If played backward, it reveals a hint—or a curse.
Folkloric Phylacteries
1. The First Cylinder: Said to hold the voice of a forgotten singer; break it, and Lomax weakens by half.
2. Wire of Continuity: A reel that never ends; burning it severs Lomax's immortality but also erases one folk tradition forever.
3. The Global Archive Index: A spectral catalog, glowing with metadata. Editing it rewrites which voices were "collected."
4. The Microphone of Souls: A field mic that draws in voices around it; wielding it lets players capture enemy powers, but risks self-erasure.
5. The Ghost Reels: A set of recordings that howl when touched. Shattering them unleashes spectral singers to aid the party.
6. Lomax's Notebook: His handwritten field notes, endlessly rewriting themselves. Destroying it severs his "authority," but every unarchived voice is lost to silence.
Recording Session Generator
Roll whenever players encounter an active recording session in progress:
1. Chain-Gang Chorus: Prisoners hammer out a rhythm on unseen tools. They can lend strength to the party... but only if someone joins the work song.
2. Hebridean Waulking Women: Beating cloth in rhythm, their voices rise and fall. Singing along heals Stress; mocking them draws spectral wrath.
3. Delta Bluesman at a Crossroads: A ghostly figure strums. Trade him a memory, and he'll teach you a power riff that cracks Lomax's wards.
4. Texas Fiddler: Playing endlessly, oblivious. If interrupted, the bow lashes out like a whip.
5. Mississippi Storyteller: Recounts tall tales that warp into living illusions. They can mislead Folknet adds or trap the party in narrative loops.
6. West Indian Calypsonian: His satire cuts like a blade. He offers the party sharp rhymes as weapons, but demands they skewer Sharp in return.
7. Italian Coal Miner's Choir: Their hymn fills the space with solidarity. Standing in their harmony grants buffs to resistance rolls.
8. Field Preacher: His sermon compels. PCs must save or be overcome by zeal, chanting his words instead of their own actions.
9. Appalachian Ballad Singer: She knows a variant of the quest you're on, but her lyrics don't match the dungeon. Reconciling them bends the session's logic.
10. Roma Violinist: His tune unsettles the Archive itself; reels snarl, Lomax flickers. But he demands protection from "being fixed" in return.
11. Prison Interviewee: A man speaks plainly of injustice. The more you listen, the harder it is to continue fighting without changing your agenda.
12. Your Own Voice: A playback of something you said earlier in the campaign, now distorted into prophecy. Following it grants advantage; resisting it risks erasure.
Dungeon Moods
1. Endless tape hiss fills every silence2. The smell of acetate and wax burns in the air3. Lights flicker like reels turning in the dark4. Your own footsteps sound like someone else's5. Every word echoes back a half-beat later, slightly altered6. A distant choir hums—but none of you can place the language
Special Encounter: The Echo Trace of Shirley Collins
Manifestation
Form: A spectral voice that threads through the hiss of tape, delicate but steady, sometimes embodied as a figure bathed in acetate light. She never stays long; she appears only when despair is thickest.
Trigger: When the party faces wipe conditions—Canon Weight maxed, Stress at breaking point, or Lomax about to unleash Tradition Snapback.
Abilities
Lilt of Clarity: Reduces Stress for all players, like hearing a familiar song in the noise.
Variant Reminder: Reveals a new way to interpret the current trap, opening an escape route or breaking a loop.
Voice Beside You: For one turn, a player may reroll a failed action, framed as her harmony lifting their voice.
Absent Duet (rare): If invoked twice in a session, she also flickers into silence, reminding the table of her real-world story—how strain and loss took her singing voice for decades. This grief effect lingers: all buffs end, but the party gains a one-time advantage against Lomax himself, fueled by the ache of what's fragile.
Attitude
Collins is not an avenging spirit. She's gentle, guiding, more echo than NPC. She doesn't fight; she helps the living remember why they're singing at all.
In-Play Use: The GM should deploy the Shirley Echo sparingly, like a once-a-session safety net or omen. She isn't lootable. You can't capture her; she's a gift that passes through. Her presence reframes the dungeon: not all recordings entomb. Some preserve enough to rekindle hope.
Victory Conditions
Defeating Lomax
Burn the Archive Room (ELECTRIC): Destroy the phylactery, but risk losing what was preserved. High Canon Weight cost, but definitive victory.
Re-Contextualize the Recordings (EDEN): Restore community ownership by re-voicing the tapes, giving them back their original context and power.
Accept Your Fate: Become part of the anthology, preserved but no longer free. The campaign continues, but players are now NPCs in someone else's story.
The Collaborative Archive (Hidden Third Option): If players work with both trapped voices and Shirley's echo, they can transform the tomb into a living archive where preservation serves the community rather than the collector.
Success & Consequences
Success doesn't mean silence; it means reshaping what the archive means. The voices Lomax captured can finally speak for themselves, but the fundamental tension between preservation and freedom remains unresolved.
Designer's Notes
The Tomb of Acetate is Electric Eden's Acererak: less about hit points, more about the slow, inevitable grind of preservation as entombment. Where the House of Canon raided institutions, the Tomb makes the archive itself the trap.
Every corridor hums with ghosts, every reel spins toward the question: what do we lose when everything is saved? Lomax represents the other side of the folk preservation coin from Sharp—where Sharp was exclusionary, Lomax was voraciously inclusive, but both approaches risk reducing living tradition to dead artifact.
The module explores the ethics of ethnographic fieldwork, the power dynamics of documentation, and the question of who owns cultural memory. Players aren't just fighting a lich; they're wrestling with the fundamental problems of how culture gets preserved and who gets to control that process.
The Shirley Collins echo serves as a reminder that preservation and loss are often intertwined, and that sometimes the most powerful voices are the ones that know when to be silent.
A Personal Note
Alan Lomax was a towering figure in American folk preservation whose field recordings captured irreplaceable voices and traditions. Like Sharp, his legacy is complex—simultaneously foundational and problematic. His archive contains treasures that might otherwise have vanished, but the methods of extraction and the institutional control of those voices raise questions that persist today.
This whimsical horror is not intended to diminish Lomax's contributions, but to wrestle with the inherent tensions in any attempt to preserve living culture. The tomb format allows us to engage with these contradictions playfully while acknowledging their serious implications.
As with The House of Canon, this module works whether players approach it as pure satire or as genuine engagement with the ethics of cultural preservation. The goal isn't to provide easy answers, but to make the questions playable.
Remember: The real tradition is the voices we freed along the way.