The Thrive Odyssey

Townsville is now called Uharte, and straddles the location of our world’s Marseille and the nearby Frioul islands.

Religion

The religion of Etxe is called Iragarmen. It is unusual in that it is silent on the subject of deities, although it is easily mixed with other traditions that do feature deities, and does assert the existence of some sort of greater beings. The religion centers around the concept that reality as we know it is a small slice or island within a much greater reality that can’t normally be understood by humans.

Worship by the followers of Iragarmen typically takes the form of meditation on short passages known as egia, which are recited or written on holy cylinders or cone sections called obos that are rolled along the ground. These egia are said to have been provided by the mythological enlightened ones of the past who learned of the greater reality, and to reveal truths about it. While a few are straightforward, most are nonsensical (at least to the unenlightened).

Iragarmen says that a person is a part of a greater being that is passing through our false reality. When it enters, a person is born, and when they die that part of the greater being has continued out into the greater reality. Most followers believe that a different part of the same greater being will eventually pass through again, but there is a minority who say the greater reality is so large that never happens. The goal of the followers of the faith is to understand and connect with their greater selves and the greater reality, to end all the struggles of their life.

Politics

The government of Etxe is a chaotic oligarchy, with both hereditary temporal leaders and charismatic spiritual wise men wielding considerable influence. Maybe someday a more formal system will be established to cut down on the infighting.

To simplify things, I’ve combined healer and scribe, as well as farmer and goatherd. There’s also only one species now. Here’s a new CSV population breakdown:

CSV

,Farmer,Fisherman,Trader,Scholar,Soldier
Berpizte,85,25,50,10,30
Uharte,40,50,0,6,15

Actions: The traders, 5 scholars and 10 soldiers from Berpizte trade shields with Hellenes for mathematics. The remaining citizens there develop evangelism. The people of Uharte build port facilities.