Editing Mage: The Ascension (section)

===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.