While I can't speak for MoP, I'm fairly confident he won't accept this, precisely because it is our burden to say what we want the Dew to do (and his privilege to tell us it does something catastrophic instead when we roll a 1).
Well, I very specifically said it wasn't
done. I just wanted to post the part I'd already written so that I wouldn't forget it. I did figure it had to have more.
All right, this is what I personally want it to do:
Do the Dew (Uses:
Mourning Dew)
Taking advantage of the continued failure of our society to have developed independent ethics review boards, we have offered several terminally elderly volunteers from the various Families the opportunity to imbibe Mourning Dew, in order to learn what we can about its effects and hopefully dispel some of the superstitious mystery surrounding it, or possibly make it worse.
Truthfully, we had no idea what to expect. Some of us — some of
them, even — expected that they would die. They did not.
Well, they were all very old and infirm, which is why they signed up for something so dangerous in the first place. Before long, just in the natural order of things, we expected that they would die. They did not.
One man from the test group was severely injured in a rockfall accident. His body broken and bleeding and his breathing weak, we expected that he would die.
He did not.
Or maybe he did. It's a little difficult to say. The body is cold and the wound barely heals, but that didn't seem to stop him from dragging himself back out of bed and going about his business. All of the subjects have gone a little quiet and a little odd, but when they do speak, they're more lucid than they've been in years.
We don't really know, yet, just what the mourning dew is, and it's anyone's guess where it came from, but it seems to make it easier for the soul to
hang on, somehow. It acts almost as a
fixative, keeping souls from drifting off to wherever it is they would otherwise go — so the dead voices some have heard in the mist really are there, clinging to this world for whatever personal reasons they might have.
Given that all the volunteers joined this project out of a hope for a respite from death, we're pretty sure, or at least hoping, that the effect is voluntary and not permanent. Still, some of us are naturally a little uncomfortable with disrupting the natural process like this. For now, while we'll give people on the brink of death the
chance to hang around in their bodies in the same way (especially those who are dying before their time), a less dramatic option also presents itself: by digging out a well in a secluded spot and filling it with water from the Lake, we were able to capture a little cloud of mourning dew above it, where our dead can stay as long as they feel like and pass on whatever messages or wisdom they want to share with the living who come to visit them. Although there's no reason to think the spirits can do anything else yet, some people have even started leaving small gifts for them, hoping for good luck and blessings.