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 the 1e Technocracy. It included things like professors feeding students to extradimensional dragons, 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. 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.

Their major flaw is intolerance: they hate alternative medicine, the poison-pedaling quacks who sell it, and the Reality Deviants who make the Masses believe it's a thing. Yes, this is supposed to make them less sympathetic, thanks to cheesy deck-stacking that bears the rank whiff of the real world. Or, y'know, the fact it's kind of hypocritical for them to hate alternative medicine for not working when they're the ones who made it stop working, thanks to the Technocracy's control over the Consensus.

Still, it makes them the most gung-ho Convention about restarting war with the Traditions. 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 forebearers' mistakes by championing an ideology that preaches genocide 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.

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