Editing Mage: The Ascension (section)

===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.