Editing Mage: The Ascension (section)

===The Technocratic Conventions===
[[File:Technocracy.png|350px|thumb|right|Other factions swear the statistics are wrong, if only they knew how to do statistics <strike>But House Fortunae</strike> SHUT IT THEY ARE JUST FORTUNE TELLERS IN WHITE COATS!...]]
Back in ye olden days, otherwise known as the ''Mage: the Dark Ages'' spin-off, the Daedalans of the Order of Reason formed out of the Awakened mages who ''weren't'' total asshats. Seeing that their fellow wizards were grinding the common people under heel, and, on behalf of [[Weaver|God]] and the [[greater good]], they began to create a new form of magic that ''anyone'' could use, otherwise known as '''SCIENCE!''' It was a roaring success, and it quickly became so popular that other mages' shit stopped working right via the "consensual reality" mechanics of the setting.

Unfortunately, that was ye olden days. Since then, they've become known as the Technocracy, agents of [[Stasis]], and they've gone from being the ''man'' to being the Man. There were a lot of factors involved, but the biggest one is that they started to shift away from trying to make life better for everyone with clever inventions to trying to control everyone for their own good. Nowadays, the Technocracy is basically a hybrid of a boring government agency and a greedy, money-grubbing business, less actively malicious than sullenly satisfied with the status quo and opposed to change for reasons of sheer inertia. They've even lost two of their old Conventions to the Traditions (the Sons of Ether and the Virtual Adepts) and are finding it harder and harder to get the ordinary people excited enough about their new inventions to actually stop them Paradox-ing.

Their original draft made them out to be, in keeping with the heavy Romanticism of the original ''World of Darkness'', villainous curs out to crush all wonder and joy out of the world to make room for more boring urban developments and soulless industrial complexes, but over time they gathered more and more fans who pointed out that anyone who invented public libraries, democracy, and toilet paper couldn't be ''all'' bad. And with Traditions like the Verbena wanting to knock us so far back the Stone Ages would look like distant golden eras of progress for reasons of purest dogmatism, or the Order of Hermes trying to take over the world and rule over the [[Harry Potter|muggles]] with an iron fist, they clearly weren't the ''worst'' game in town.

Eventually, White Wolf got out of their patchouli and weed-scented cave and, blinking in the sun, agreed, making them playable and quietly retconning their earlier portrayal as Tradition propaganda. It was a smart move that improved the game immensely. Nowadays, they're pretty much an alternative playable set of factions, with their own "reforming a corrupt, stagnant monolith from within" game feel compared to yet another "scrappy rebels fighting against the modern world" plot you can get anywhere else in the World of Darkness. After all, even in their original portrayals, they were the front-line fighters to keep ordinary people safe from supernatural threats, and they still have their share of people who genuinely want to make the world a better place.

A long time ago, they tried to wipe out the Traditions by force in a program of attack called the Pogrom. It was largely successful, but for a number of reasons they dropped it a while ago, and only splinter elements want a return to it. Nowadays, the Technocracy is largely committed to "winning the argument," and only intervening when local mages are getting out of hand. The Traditions and the Technocracy hate each other, but since they ultimately both want humanity to "ascend," no matter how sharply they disagree on what that means, their hearts are both in the right-ish place, and they both regularly declare truces and cooperate to fight Nephandi, Marauders, and regular-old human evils like child pornographers. And that makes them among the best foils/opponents in the tabletop gaming community.

====[[Iteration X]]====
Talking about the It X'ers inevitably means talking about the biggest divide between them. On the one hand, you have the old guard of master craftsmen and inventors, the cool ones. On the other, you have the Autopolitans, crazy transhumanists worshipping the "Xth Iteration" of the Master Computer they've built with their own hands. Naturally, there's a lot of friction there. As a whole, they are the Technocracy's R&D division, focusing on cybernetics and robotics, and they focus on the spheres of Forces and Matter.  

Unfortunately, said Computer is almost certainly some kind of rogue god possessing the Computer to control and puppeteer them rather than an "actual" Artificial General Intelligence. And it keeps sabotaging other projects to create more because they would reveal that Computer is ''not'' an AGI. It enforces a degree of conformity and anti-supernatural thinking on Iteration X that even other Technocrats find tiresome, and has left the Convention struggling to adapt and change in the face of Mundane science taking some weird, quantum physics-y directions. 

Fortunately, the Avatar Storm cut them off from their base of operations on the Umbral machine-planet Autocthonia (a counter-Earth), forcing them to get by without its dark influence and accomplishing many much-needed reforms. Unfortunately, they ''really'' want to try to go get it back, and even more unfortunately, those trapped by the Storm were effectively transformed into Drones (flesh/spirit amalgamations) and enslaved by the Computer which runs Autocthonia; see Threat Null below and note that the Null It X'ers didn't even have to change their faction name.

====[[New World Order]]====
If the Technocracy is the Man, then the NWO (no relation to the professional wrestling stable of the same name) is the Man's Man, man. They are the leaders of the Technocracy, acting as advisers around the world to governments and industries, trying to steer humanity in what they think is the right direction. Their leaders are the Men in White, and their foot soldiers are the Men in Black, the iconic uniforms using the organization's mastery of the Mind sphere to tap into the Masses' brains to make them hard to spot. They ''also'' handle the basic indoctrination every Technocrat goes through, and they're the foremost Technocrats in terms of trying to "recruit" mages. 

Not ''initially'' seen as sinister on the surface by the masses as they use government positions and political causes to legitimize their rule (they were the biggest advocates of dropping the Pogrom, and their leader is a former Ecstacist who swapped sides during the Second World War), since convincing mages to turn peacefully is their preference, but they have all kinds of ''1984'' methods in their closet for "difficult cases", and are responsible for running all the Technocracy's privacy-invading public surveillance jobs.

Ironically even while being the youngest, largest and most influential convention they are prone to [[administratum|self sabotaging]] due to [[servitor|constant brain wipes on lower staff]]  and [[High_Lords_of_Terra|their leaderships extreme  paranoia]]. They are known to delete memories and media related to methods on how to hunt monsters, the existance of monsters,[[heresy| the existance of the traitor conventions]], the past of the NWO before the industrial revolution, and any remnants of the order of reason not related to the technocracy. [[lulz|All while hunting both monsters & traitors and cutting deals with hunters affiliated to the old order]].

====[[Progenitors]]====
The biological sciences division, specializing in everything from medicine to genetic engineering under the umbrella of the Life sphere. Used to have a bunch of horrible eugenics and transhuman types, but after discovering them collaborating with [[Nazis]] and [[Nephandi]] during the Second World War, they purged that division, and are today some of the nicest, most bro-tier Technocrats... mostly. They really, ''really'', homicidally hate homeopathy, healing crystals, ''reiki'', and all that other New Age pseudo-medicine. Like, they think of it as an honest-to-God ''war crime''. This tends to make them the most predisposed towards violence against the Traditions. 

The other Conventions generally regard Traditions as either pathetic throwbacks and relics of a bygone time or a reliable, resourceful enemies who at least aren't as crazy as the Nephandi or Marauders. Not the Progenitors. To a Progenitor, the Traditions are FUCKING KILLING PEOPLE WITH NONSENSE NON-SCIENCE, and force is completely justified to stop them and save ordinary people from their manipulation. They were one of the few Conventions to actually undergo character development between editions: initial versions stressed their role in drugging humanity into sleepy, compliant docility while being moustache-twirling mad scientists behind the scenes, whereas later ones pressed on the idea that they are doctors first and foremost, hoping to heal the wounds of their faction and the rest of the world.

====[[The Syndicate]]====
Probably the Convention that hews closest to its stereotype, the Syndicate are the Technocracy's business and marketing division. Naturally, this means they're a bunch of cut-throat Gordon Gekko-types who love destructive, Darwinian competition, and are so conservative that they think the biggest problem with the Technocracy today is that their fellow Conventions are rocking the boat too much and need to focus less on what could be. (Yes, this is the same organization we called a "corrupt, stagnant monolith" several paragraphs up). 

They have a rivalry with their colleagues in the [[New_World_Order|NWO]]. Over the leadership of the technocratic union and the role of the technocracy as a whole they haven't all been brainwiped or [[Squatted|made to disappear]] due to their control of the unions finances. Their job is making sure the shell companies of the union stay profitable, the development of stagnant economies into viable business ventures and most infamously record keeping. This last part is the thing that their peers in the NWO [[rage| hate the most]] as while the NWO censors [[lolwut|The Syndicate registers what they censored]] leading to even more protection from persecution via [[Just_As_Planned|blackmail]]. 

Their trolling of the NWO aside they are one of the most mundane conventions they are not supersoldiers, a ministry of truth or engineers of scientific marvels they are simply businessmen and mathematicians their control over production, shipping, and finance is their power they can hire hordes of hunters to exterminate their enemies and buy out the loyalty of the entire populace of a city. Their actions can incentivize prosperity and economic growth for countries at the brink of financial ruin and bring billionaires to bankrupcy.

The closest thing to something sympathetic about them is that they honestly believe in being the Masses' partners rather than their rulers and that they just can't or won't see how flawed and cruel their philosophy really is: unlike their dark mirror in the Nephandi, they ''do'' believe in things besides just enriching themselves. They focus on the spheres of Entropy and Prime for their hyper-economics, but they have a lot of cross-training in other areas to look into marketing the other Conventions' stuff, so yeah, your student loan, mortgage, credit card, (lack of) savings and retirement pension belongs and depends on a bunch of not-mages with a terrible social darwinist complex, double amusing because anyone who knows a bit about finances and money knows how susceptible to consensual reality the whole thing is IRL.

====[[Void Engineers]]====

[[File:Donut-steel.png|300px|thumb|right|DONUT STEEL!]]

As the Sons of Ether are to the Traditions, the Void Engineers are to the Technocracy. Why, you ask? Three words: Wizard [[Space Marines]]. Fuck yes! 

Regarded by mages as "the good ones" and their fellow Technocrats as the loose cannons, the Void Engineers are masters of exploration. In ye olden days, they searched the bottom of the sea and the furthest reaches of the land, and in modern times they chart the Deep Umbra and run a thriving community of space stations throughout the solar system. They are masters of the spheres of Correspondence and Dimensional Science, a heavily-modified version of the Traditions' Spirit sphere. 

The Engineers are the most free-spirited of the Technocrats, and the most likely to collaborate with the Traditions (they are especially friendly enemies with the Euthanatos), but they're still loyal technocrats. In fact, while they retain informal ties to the Etherites, ''they'' were the ones who pushed to remove the Luminiferous Ether from the Consensus to keep their brother Convention in line. They also tend to be viewed by the other conventions as the "less corrupt" faction only because they don't have to get their hands dirty running the "real world" like their brethren. On the other, other hand, they are the single most likely mage-group to get a multi-faction party together to get shit done and pull awesomely pragmatic feats like frying a sub-continent darkening vampire [[Antediluvian]] by using orbital mirrors to reflect and concentrate light from the other side of the world. 

They had a whole subplot in ''Revised'' where they recruited Traditions to help fight [[#Threat_Null|Threat Null]], but it's a long story and M20's probably going to make it obsolete when it finally comes out, so long story short: a contingent of Void Engineers wandered off into the Deep Umbra (the extra-extra-dimensional realms of pure possibility- aw fuck it just good old OUTSIDE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM) and found something that freaked them right the fuck out and sent them running back home to [[Space Marines|militarize]] - a bunch of high-level Technocrats who'd fucked off to the edge of reality and became the Borg.  Worse, since Threat Null can hijack any Technocrat's conditioning to turn them into a temporary unwitting sleeper agent, they need to recruit Tradition mages to fight them, since going to the Technocracy might not only overplay their hand, but reveal that they de-program their people of any conditioning they might've undergone.

{{WoD-Conventions}}