I’ve had an idea that certain supernatural/magical elements in the awakening/society stage. I’ve been thinking about things such as people being able to predict the weather, able to summon rain, cure diseases, and predict future events. “But Thrive is supposed to be a scientific game and supernatural elements go against being scientific” you may ask. But my refutation to this is that if Thrive is supposed to be a simulation game and supernatural/magic beliefs were apart of human history and as such deserve to be in the game. One problem that could occur with supernatural/magic elements is the player knowing that’s made up nonsense in the real world and thus any noneffective supernatural/magic systems in the game will be ignored. But if there are certain supernatural/magical elements that in the game that do work or at least enough to make the player think, “Maybe this person claiming to have magical powers maybe actually has mgaical powers from the gods”. And going back to earlier where the player does not believe in the supernatural/magic imagine a scenario where a prophet comes to the player saying that if they don’t repent and start giving to the lower class that a great plague will come to your land. The player initially brushes this off as an irrational superstition and ignores the prophet. But later the plague described by the prophet does actually come to your land in a case of the prophet being, “I tried telling you so and you ignored me!” This could make the skeptical player start to think that maybe there is a supernatural/magic element in this game. This system could also work in the religion systems as many religions have stories of miracles and supernatural occurrences happening in history.
Maybe these prophecies would only have a chance to turn out being true?
I was thinking so, it could also be based on the reliability (a stat that could be initially hidden to the player) of the prophet also.
Or maybe the more wild a prophecy is, the smaller the chance it will happen?
Or a combination of both?
Though I like this idea, I think “supernatural” events like this should always be able to be reasonably explained as coincidences. For example, if your society upset a religious leader and they cursed your land, causing the weather to change and create a famine, within the game’s world it shouldn’t feel like actual magic had to be at play (even if in the game’s code that event really was what triggered the famine).
Would sudden locust swarms be considered as of one these supposedly “magical-but-not-really-magical” events?
Perhaps. Especially if such alien locusts were domesticated somehow so that they could be released as weapons against enemies.
Is it possible to domesticate Cicadas?
If one tried hard enough, perhaps? As an efficient protein source?
Or maybe the way they predict things are kind of protosciences like astrology, alchemy, heroic medicine, folk ecology, folk/supernatural meteorology, herbalism
Predictions shouldn’t be for the impossible variety of events to happen though…
I think a great plausible deniability way to do this would be that if well kept records of one of these events are kept until the modern era, you can do a much of archeology and history and learn what happened, for example you could learn the rituals of cleansing your soul included antibiotic poisons which was why x religion’s people survived and most other people survived, or the locusts were on a 17 year cycle but tended to move one river over every other cycle and a prophet figured that out, or some scientists do statistical analysis and determine if there were a dozen attempted cults and religions making similar claims one almost certainly would come true and the player remembers there were kinda a lot of cults during that editor cycle. BUT!!! You only get to do one! You might get a half dozen weird guys claiming something really crazy is gonna happen, and several will come true, but you only get an explanation for one! And if the game has not explanation for what happened or it was just a coincidence no one can rationalize, just destroy the records with a faked “random” catastrophe so it doesn’t qualify for research. Also some prophets could predict stuff like “that guy will come back from the dead” but it only ever works for his friends with reputations for faking their deaths, so we can have lots of literal obvious fakes.
Would there also be incidents when “random” figures would pretty much establish new religions (see: the two largest abrahamic religions)?
I do wonder if illnesses/erratic behaviors due to lead/mercury poisoning would be considered something initially supernatural?
Perhaps. Lots of things not that easy to understand could be linked to divine powers initially.
And people used to think Mercury could cure illnesses, or was magical. Just some 200 years ago in the U.S., people used to take Mercury pills, which were called “Thunderclappers”.
From Wikipedia:
- fifty dozen of Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills, laxatives containing more than 50% mercury, which have since colloquially been referred to as “thunderclappers”. Their meat-rich diet and lack of clean water during the expedition gave the men cause to use them frequently. Although their efficacy is questionable, their high mercury content provided a tracer by which archaeologists have been able to verify one of the Corps’ campsites on their route to the Pacific. As of 2024, Travelers’ Rest State Park, near Lolo, Montana, is the only location to be confirmed via the analysis of the Corps’ latrines.[32][33][34][35]
Also recall Radium used to be used as a medicine until people noticed it caused the users to slowly rot away.
I think Radium also used to be used in clocks to make them glow…
Well good we’ve realized that such substances shouldn’t ever get that close to people. For a less developed society however, Radium could be a curse-mineral thing used to harm targets long-term I suppose.