Harvesters of Lost Futures

By Bruce Baugh (brucebaugh@mindspring.com)

Author's Notes

While reading about World War I and the life stories of some of the key decision-makers, I was struck by a sense of how much potential talent, drive, and earnest concern went to waste as people locked themselves into various conceptual tunnels. This a response to that.

It is sort of a back-door route into alternate histories for the World of Darkness. I like the pocket realms that form around Unbidden in Whispering Vault, and seek here to do something similar, except tinged with the gentler colors of lost possibilities.

Description

There are, among the Stygian dead, those who take the Dictum Mortuum seriously, and yet who hate to see so much waste pass by without any mitigation whatsoever. To the Hierarchy, their activities would be -- if discovered -- as dangerous as any other challenge to the sanctity of the Shroud, while to thorough-going Shroud-toppling Renegades they'd be merely cowards lacking the courage of their convictions. Which, if any, of these interpretations is true is a matter for judgment.

The Harvest begins with Oracles. With Fatalism, they can sense which individuals are likely to rise to positions of power and influence. They can also, sometimes, sense which of these individuals will rise on piles of shattered dreams.

Those with this insight then turn to others to do something about it. Specifically, the Oracles turn to Sandmen and to Sluagh. Both sorts of creature can harvest samples of the vital dreams of predestined dream-shatterers while the dreams are fresh -- most often they harvest from people in their 20s and 30s, settling into adulthood but still carrying enthusiastic vigor.

The Harvesters then take these dreams away for safekeeping, into deep realms of the Tempest or obscure corners of the Dreaming. There they build little domains in which to release the dreams, and watch the unfolding of futures that might have been.

The Harvesters don't exactly do anything with the dream-histories they shelter. That's not the point. For them it's sufficient that some fraction of early hopes not go altogether to waste.

At least, it's been sufficient so far. If the Harvesters were to turn activist, they might become quite dangerous. Implanting the harvested dreams in the minds of mortal men and women would probably simply cause insanity in most. But in some it might spur fresh efforts to make those dreams real. This might even be admirable, except that nothing ensures that the implanted dreams would escape the same cycle of degredation and lost that befell their original dreamers.

Most occupy spherical volumes a few feet across, usually suspended within glass or crystal globes. Some are much smaller, and flourish within jeweled pendants or rings, while a few are much larger and spread like mirror-flat lakes across small valleys.

It's also possible that an outside explorer -- a Silent Strider, perhaps, or a Harbinger, or even a Void Engineer -- could encounter these quiet byways where groves of dream-worlds flourish. The incautious explorer could easily fall into one...and perhaps lose the memory of how she got there. She might also seek to bring one back to use as a trap for others.