ANDERS MAGE PAGE 2.0

Some notes on the Technocracy.

The Conventions are much more like each other than the Traditions are. They all use almost the same language and reality, with small changes in focus. A Void Engineer will understand a member of Iteration X quite well, although they have different specialties.

Iteration X, Void Engineers and the Progenitors are much more directed towards research than the New World Order and the Syndicate, who are more concerned with keeping the status quo. This may lead to interesting conflicts, as we have seen.

The current 5 Conventions are not the original Conventions. As the Technocracy has evolved, many Conventions have been created, used and disbanded. For example, the Convention responsible for the creation of the capitalist economy has been disbanded, the remaining parts absorbed into the Syndicate and New World Order. The current Conventions are merely the current large projects (there are probably many technomancers involved in philosophy and psychology, but they are too few to form their own Conventions).

What kind of magick does the Technocracy use? In my opinion, they do not use vulgar magick at all. Vulgar magick is anathema to their whole philosophy (a member of the Celestial Chorus will not call upon demons, a Dreamspeaker will not ravage the land). Instead they rely on coincidental magick, and often they avoid even that. Instead, there is always technology. Why use Correspondence when there exists two-way encrypted Telepresence? Why use Forces, when there are firearms? Since the Technocracy has technology several decades ahead of everyone else, and can direct development at will (not to mention decide what "natural laws" should exist), they will almost never need to use magick in the form of the Traditions.

One advantage of Technomancer magick is that you don't have to be a mage to use it. Since they have made most Sleepers believe it works, it is actively supported by reality. Anyone with the necessary knowledge and tools can build a computer, while the creation of an equivalent Hermetic Talisman (Head of Wisdom?) will be a complex process needing much esoteric knowledge, tass and an Awakened Avatar. Technomancer magick is potentially usable by everyone, which was its original goal.

When the Technocracy became corrupt, it began to try to turn people away from certain technology, since they were easier to control that way. Computer manuals are notoriously hard to understand for normal people, just to avoid too many supporters of the Virtual Adepts. Television behaves in somewhat mysterious ways to the normal person, who can't program his VCR (video cassette recorder).

Note the similarities between the Illuminati and the Technocracy. In fact, the whole idea of Illuminati may be the result of the collective subconscious knowledge mankind has about the forces that control it. An ordinary person in the World of Darkness will not know anything about the Technocracy, the Traditions, the Camarilla, Pentex and everything else. But he will feel there is something going on out there, something dark and important. This has led to the creation of the illuminati myth (which the Rosicrucians, the Technocracy, the Discordians and many other groups actively support. After all, when people are wearing illuminati T-shirts, who will take conspiracies seriously?).

The Technocracy has done a great work hiding other mages (and other supernatural phenomena) using their paradigm. But this works both ways. No serious historian will believe that history for the last 500 years has been shaped by a secret group of magicians! The Technocracy is trying to hide from everyone, and thus turns even more secret all the time. The technomancers are slowly pushed out from the reality they are creating, as there should not be any technomancers inside it. In the end, they will perhaps vanish completely when their work is done. Or they are trying to remain, spreading conspiracy theories to make people believe in secret groups influencing the destiny of mankind.

The Technocracy will become even more scary if it is not treated as a group of mages but as an intangible presence. Since it prefers to work in the shadows, using unknowing pawns, it will appear faceless. If the players never even see a technomancer (or realize they have met one), the Technocracy will seem like a faceless enemy, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. This will turn the Ascension War into a very bleak reality, as the mages realize they are not fighting against a group of mages but an inhuman machine, almost impossible to reach or resist.