Editing Mage: The Ascension (section)

==Ascension or Armageddon==
Just like the other two big games, Mage: The Ascension got special treatment when it came to the Time of Judgement, with it getting a book all to itself. A central theme is that of Judgement, the Tenth Sphere that many Mages have looked for so long. It's not a traditional Sphere in that you can take dots in it to use magic: it is a manifestation of the judgment that is to come to all of magic and its users.

Quite infamously, ''Mage'' didn't have endgame scenarios as up-to-snuff as ''Vampire'' or ''Werewolf''.  One is seen as pretty good, one as good but situational and tied to a particular style of play, and the rest are just mediocre to bad, pulling huge, important characters and plot points out of nowhere or just not really being a good fit for the gameline.

===Judgement===

Or, The Pretty Good One.

Essentially, [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse| the World of Darkness is fatally flawed by nature, and in order to fix anything, it is first necessary to end everything]].  When the world ends, all humanity will Awaken, and everyone will get a happy ending.  Unfortunately, one crazed Marauder is trying to save the world, and it's up to you to stop him.  The irony of this situation is never directly addressed but is skirted around obliquely.  

Said crazed Marauder is, in fact, Voormas, the former head of the Euthanos, and he's split away to start strangling reality to death in an attempt to save it by tearing apart the Gauntlet between the realms of the living and the dead, to instead put himself into the place of the Death aspect so that mankind need never suffer loss or death again. (Kinda sad if you think about it, the poor bugger must have been badly traumatized. Still...)  

So, with the signs of the End Times clear, the heads of all nine Traditions gear up to actually have everyone attend a Council meeting for the first time in a while, and the Technocracy can't resist the temptation to try to decapitate the snake by assassinating them all.  Disruption keeps them from doing this until the situation is laid bare before the heroes, and some drama with the Rogue Council having the Tenth Seat takes place, but eventually, Technocratic hit-men warp in and start killing everyone, even calling in mundane police and Riot cops for backup, as the Tenth Seat gets stolen by a group of people trying to fix the world, who then grab the party.  They have them start working on a spell to create a rubric for the new world, and if they do so, they end up becoming major, ''major'' political players in the Traditions.  

From there, the Euthanoi lose the Realm of Entropy to Voormas, choosing to believe that he can be beaten rather than kill the world outright to stop him.  The Gauntlet gets shredded, causing mass, haphazard Awakenings all over the globe that tax the Technocracy's ability to suppress them to the limit.  However, it also unleashes the Avatar Storm into the physical world, which fucks up the Traditions even worse.  The menagerie of spirits from ''Werewolf'' start causing metaphorical, spiritual rot to become very-literal structural rot, destroying countless pollution-spewing factories and the like.  In the end, a desperate Technocracy directly moves to control several Earth governments, declares the Traditions terrorists using advanced technology to destroy civilization, and moves from the usual bullshit to open warfare, with a final objective being the mass capture and internment or outright elimination of all Reality Deviants.  

The Hollow Ones of all people step up to the plate and take a new role as leaders of the resistance against these forces, while the Traditions ''finally'' put aside their petty differences and come together to try to make strides in fixing the world's problems once and for all in a War Council.  Both gather their forces for a massive battle in Australia, where there is some protection from the Avatar Storm, but a message comes to the PCs: they need not to ''destroy'' the Technocracy, but save it from itself.  Its aid will be needed against coming threats.  So, hopefully, they set out to visit the Ivory Tower itself, the heart of the Technocracy.

The place is deserted, dusty, and mostly unused, and they find that all but one of the leaders of the Technocracy have just withered away into nothing, faded into their pure intelligence and drives, devoid of humanity.  The only one left is the leader of the Void Engineers (inhabiting the cloned body of a young boy), who explains things to the PCs, claiming that he and the rest of his faction are buzzing off to a new universe they've discovered, rather than engage in the upcoming transhumanist ascension he thinks will probably resemble what's happened to his former peers.  He also warns them that the Marauders are coordinating together to assault whoever wins the battle between the Traditions and the Technocracy and that while they might not like each other he doesn't want ''that'' freakshow to take over either. Then, he gives them an artifact to help with the whole world-ending-transhumanist thing, shows them the control panel that broadcasts orders to all Technocrats, and peaces out.

From there, the party needs to figure out a way to get the Technocrats to stand down and accept the ritual they've cooked up without frying their brains by activating their programming, or backlashing the entire Technocracy with Paradox. Or losing themselves to the mass-mind. And maybe laying some groundwork for both sides putting down their guns, if you bother to try.

Then, everyone hopefully gears up to get ready for full Ascension.  But first, the party will have to deal with Voormas, who's going to try to kill Death itself, to make sure the new world is without pain and loss... and either not realizing or not caring that doing so will lead to a world of stodgy stasis, just as deformed and flawed as this one.  At the same time, the combined armies of the Technocracy and the Traditions stop the Marauders from literally driving all humanity mad... or, if you failed, whichever group survives tries and utterly fails to do so.  

Either way, the heroes storm the ruined realm of Entropy, past armies of undead, and stand before him, as he tries to complete his ritual while blasting at them.  Killing him outright is hard and counterproductive (his death curse causes his killer to inherit his madness and take up his work), so preventing him from successfully aligning what he needs to complete his ritual and forging a new universe free of karma or death is the favored outcome here.  This is easiest by having the artifact the leader of the Void Engineers gave you merge with his staff, destroying both and leaving him helpless to achieve his purpose.

If they succeed, it's all roses.  The Nephandi get what they always wanted, and are snuffed out or tortured forever, the Marauders all fuck off into their own little worlds and stay there, alone forever, and the rest of mankind collectively Awakens, then Ascends, with the Traditions and the Technocracy somehow managing to make their mutually-exclusive end goals work.

It's easily the best-designed scenario, and it does play with the themes of the overall gameline quite well.  Better, it manages to make the PCs important to the action all the way through.  There are a few problems here and there, mostly with the complex last-minute mythology it tries to bolt onto proceedings that I mostly left out, but it's not ''that'' important for the purposes of playing a good, rousing game of Good End.

===The Revolution Will Be Televised===

The Technocracy Good End.  

Essentially, the better elements of the Technocracy have always been stockpiling power, waiting for the more xenophobic elements to fully clear the Earth of dissenting magical philosophies before seizing power themselves as the Unionists, and bringing back that old-time paradigm: the [[Noblebright|old, positive ideals of the Order of Reason, reborn in the 21st century]].  They are opposed by the Loyalists, Technocrats who just want to take over the world and rule it for its own good forever, reshaping the bodies and minds of all humanity to their will.  

Suddenly, the Avatar Storm overtakes several Horizon Constructs and cuts off the Ivory Tower from the rest of the Technocracy.  They can send orders, but not move around troops.

As the Gauntlet starts to fall apart, letting through all manner of supernatural critters from other planes and causing the cataclysmic events of other gamelines, these two super-factions start a conflict with one another just shy of all-out war; ham-fisted Loyalists use more and more extreme methods to seal dimensional breaches and deal with witnesses, while angry Unionists argue that the current crisis is just the culmination of their failures and proof of how far the organization has drifted from the noble goals of the Order of Reason.  Some Unionists even collaborate with Traditions to protect the innocent caught in the crossfire.  

Then, Control falls silent, isolating many Technocratic parties for a long period of time.  Just long enough for them to get used to making their own calls, in fact, before suddenly communications resume, demanding mass status reports for new supervisors no one's ever heard of.  In the meanwhile, lots of Technocrats collaborated with Traditions or went against procedure, and now they're being cracked down on for it.  Worse, the supervisors are clearly not at all informed of how bad the situation is up in their Ivory Tower, and send people into crazy-dangerous situations with moronic restrictions or insufficient equipment.  

Revolution brews.  Mid-level managers start ignoring orders.  More and more ground-level Technocrats turn Unionist.  Many begin collaborating more and more openly with the technically-minded Traditions. And when the Avatar Storm finally hits the physical world and people start Awakening en-masse, things boil over.  Both sides work to contain the damage while actively working to destroy one another.  Many Loyalists go completely insane rather than bend their worldview to accommodate the wackiness going on. It also frees up the Technocratic leadership trapped in their Horizon Realm to come back into the physical world as spirits, so that's fun.  

Paradox gets supercharged as a panicked consensus tries to protect itself, fucking up all non-techomantic magic.  From there, the Unionists, assisted by cabals of Virtual Adepts and Etherites, gets ready for a massive conflict against the Loyalists, as the Loyalists prepare to eliminate all Reality Deviants and take over the world, regardless of collateral damage, while more and more monsters come out through the Umbra.  In the end, hopefully, the Unionists emerge triumphant, creating a Technocracy Good End, where the reborn ideals of the Order of Reason triumph over the corruption of the Loyalists, in a new world of Enlightened Science.  

It's a good idea for a finale.  Better than most of these others.  Unfortunately, it's not very well-designed.  It just tells the story, barely bothering to talk about what the PCs should do, or even if they should be a Traditional cabal or a Technocratic amalgam.  More of an idea-mine than an actual module... but still, it has a vision, and it actually addresses the long fascination with the positive side of the gameline's traditional antagonists.  

Unfortunately, it's all downhill from here...

===The Earth Will Shake===

Good old meteor apocalypse, some mages plan to escape into the Umbra, and other Traditions and Technocracy attempt to blow it up.

Too mediocre to be called the worst, but easily the least popular of the five.

===A Whimper, Not a Bang===

Aliens from another universe kidnap Mage avatars and drain magic because they need it. Fucking Bitches.

This is a real stinker. Probably not the '''worst''' ToJ scenario, but up there. The aliens themselves can be interesting and fun on their own, but the scenario itself is profoundly dreary and hopeless, with the loss of all dynamic force in the universe (magick and Enlightened Science alike) being a foregone conclusion from the beginning of the scenario.

Fun fact: it is implied that this ending is part of the backstory of Mage: the Awakening. "Perhaps in this new universe magic will revolve around a ancient city." - Bill Bridges, who wrote both this scenario and Mage: the Awakening.

===Hell on Earth===

The first Nephandus, Aswadim, Nameless One proceeds to play most of reality like a fiddle through the clever plan of waiting until literally everyone else fucks up badly enough. By the time he starts taking a direct hand in things, he's running both sides of the Ascension War and forces the Avatar storm into an unprotected world. <s>Morgan Freeman</s> Senex manages to give him a booboo before being stomped into paste. And then things get worse - he kills the Alder Bole, most remaining tradition forces die trying to retake Mus, and he summons his undying masters into the world before becoming one of them himself. 

There are no good endings. The best hope the world has at this point is for a new set of Awakened to somehow kick off the forces of hell, when those forces include multiple incarnate Aswadim who own the planet and one has a war form that's almost impossible to look at without tearing up your sheet, let alone fight.

If that sounds cool in a 40k sort of way, read on.  The Hell on Earth scenario opens by describing the idea of 'Descent,' a sort of opposite of Ascension, and warns that humanity can choose darkness over light. The book ''demands'' that Descent be portrayed as a result of human failure.  Here's a quote: "Don’t forget to illustrate the human hubris, selfishness and folly that ''earn'' mankind the sentence of Descent."  ([[Fail|It then goes on to describe the all-powerful villain and his equally invincible flunkies conquering the world and killing ''fucking everyone'' in what is basically a straight fight]].) The scenario is full of epic battles and heroic last stands. No one shirks from the duty of fighting the Nephandi, or tries to get one over on their political rivals in the chaos. Hell, the PCs have to actively fuck up to prevent the Traditions and Technocracy from reconciling.

Speaking of last stands, [[Derp|one of the other themes is the futility of sacrifice]].  If you see a contradiction between that and the above sentence about human selfishness earning Descent, congratulations, you're smarter than Brian Campbell.  As for the party, Hell on Earth doesn't give them ''nothing'' to do, but they very much are witnesses to the end of the world, rather than actors trying to prevent it. The party is led around the nose setting up refuges for surviving/future Mages to hide in.

An alternative view is that this was actually supposed to be "Chaos Uber Alles," the writer just got the Marauders and Nephandi mixed up. Genocide, mayhem, and terrorism fall more into the Marauders' toolkit. In the end, a vastly depopulated earth is ruled over by a handful of mad bastards' fantasy worlds with the other mages bending the knee, dying horribly, or fleeing. The Nephandi ending would be like "the magic goes away" scenario above combined with the ending of Evangelion, except with a corrupt, magickless humanity turning into feces instead of tang.

Overall, this is probably the worst of the M:TA Time of Judgement scenarios due to shoddy writing, the sheer grimderp overload, and the tacit encouragement of [[Railroading|railroading]] the party into being helpless witnesses to the death of the world.