Editing Mage: The Ascension (section)

====[[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.