Progenitors

The Progenitors are one of the five remaining Conventions of the Technocratic Union in Mage: The Ascension. They are the Union's dedicated biological scientists. Organic chemistry, agriculture, genetics, and medicine all fall under their auspices.

The 1e Progenitor fluff was stupid, even by the standards of 1e's Technocracy. It included things like professors feeding students to extradimensional dragons for the kicks, pollen allergies being invented to prevent humans from "communing with nature", and an attempt to destroy the human capacity to Awaken via tainted medication. One of their divisions was literally devoted entirely into drugging the masses into sleepy, dull-witted compliance so the New World Order could work with less resistance. Some real /pol/-tier conspiracy shit, basically.

By 2e and beyond, the Progenitors had actually become pretty Awesome. The 1e nonsense had been retconned away as the hysterical fearmongering it obviously was and the Convention became focused on actually helping the world, ie, trying to convince the Verbena to VACCINATE THEIR GODDAMN KIDS, albeit still with uplifted velociraptors, living spaceships, and having a werewolf arm grafted to your torso. Because Mage. Revised outright made them heroes, doctors trying to bind up and heal the wounds of their faction and an ailing world.

Hilariously, they've managed to make inroads with, of all people, the Glass Walkers. Which makes a kind of sense; as werewolves go the Glass Walkers are reasonably progressive and forward-thinking too, but... I mean, even the most progressive faction in a gameline of reactionary eco-fanatics is still a strange bedfellow for such equally-fanatical disciples of progress.

That said, things aren't all roses and humanitarianism.

Their major flaws are intolerance and hypocrisy: they hate alternative medicine, the poison-pedalling quacks who sell it, and the Reality Deviants who make the Masses believe it's a thing. Their fanatic commitment to the ideas of progress and how it exists in opposition to (ironically) conservative and traditional forces in the world also drives them to hate anything that reminds them of the past too, like vampires. (Not that vampires are usually pretty sympathetic anyway, but, you know, some of them are at least trying, genocide is always wrong outside of edge cases, etc.)

This makes them the most obviously gung-ho Convention about restarting outright war with the Traditions, which the rest of the Technocracy don't want due to the colossal messes this would cause; they also tend to quietly ignore that they're the ones who made altmed stop working via the Technocracy's control over the Consensus. Yes, this is supposed to make them less sympathetic because White Wolf are fucking hippies who ceaselessly rail against the evils of the Man, but exactly whether or not it does is up to the reader due to White Wolf's characteristic heavy-handedness and the IRL dangers of altmed's woo-woo bullshit creating an immediate and justified bias in favour of the Progenitors for most.

Infamously, in a mirror to their rivals in the Verbena who did much the same, they enthusiastically supported the Nazis before evidence of mass Nephandus involvement in the Third Reich became impossible to ignore, and while the Progenitors sincerely believe they've purged themselves of the toxic philosophies like eugenics that led them down that dark road, they are indirectly repeating their forbearers' mistakes by (directly or otherwise) supporting an ideology that preaches genocide (this time of Reality Deviants) as a solution to all the world's problems.

Which is frankly a shockingly well done bit of subtlety for a gameline that was once so deep in its alternative-medicine cups that it tried to make a faction of doctors the bad guys. Good going, White Wolf!

Members of the Technocratic Conventions
Iteration X	New World Order	Progenitors	The Syndicate	Void Engineers