The Syndicate

The Syndicate is one of the five remaining Conventions of the Technocratic Union in Mage: The Ascension. The Syndicate are the financiers, marketers, and PR specialists of the Union.

Equally at home making multi-billion dollar deals from a penthouse in Singapore and breaking legs in the back rooms of a dingy Chicago bistro, the Syndicate operates almost exclusively within the bounds of Consensus reality. No powered armor or nano-swarms for them, thanks. To the Syndicate, cutthroat executive power and an eye for market fluctuations can control more than an orbital laser could ever hope to.

They thus are prone to being slandered by other conventions with something of a reputation for being a lethal combination of insufferable dreary, horrifyingly amoral, and (tragically) completely indispensable. They provide both the mundane capital and super-futuristic fuel that keeps the Union running, through their unique ability to turn human perception of value into raw Quintessence. Combine this with their role in integrating the other Conventions utopian ideologies and revolutionary technologies into the mundane world, and you can see why they are regarded as the world's most necessary dream crushers.

On the other hand The Syndicate specializes not only in making short term profit for the technocracy but also developing places in financial ruin into prosperous and profitable environments they'll go to the run down ghetto, the banana republic and even the most backwater third world cesspit imaginable with no electricity, running water, or education system and renew its industry along with raising the quality of life of its inhabitants by providing basic necessities. Of course these acts are not gifts they are investments as the people they helped will be fanatically loyal to the technocracy as a result.

Still, they sometimes go too far. For every Syndic helping a startup reinvigorate a dying small town, there are ten getting godlike wealth by basically enslaving the Masses and working them to death. Combine this with the role they (maybe) had in the creation of Pentex and one can see why the New World Order is beginning to come down harder and harder on them. They're also the most prone to intra-Convention infighting in the Technocracy, with different operatives and branches all-but starting proxy wars over the same materials, and the people on top see this as a good thing unless it cuts into profits as a whole. It's by design, after all; survival of the fittest as the invisible hand of the market determines who's "fit."

Perhaps even more tragically... most of them really do buy into it all. They sincerely think they're the Masses' partners rather than rulers, and that their job is to create wealth rather than exploit it. They either can't or won't see just how fucked up raw, unfettered Darwinian competition really is at the human level, or that most people without the supernatural ability to manipulate probability can't "beat the odds" with pluck and diligence; that's how odds work. The Syndicate is honestly trying to help mankind develop economically and technologically, and that's what makes the harm they cause all the worse.

As a Convention, they have no friends and few enemies. For God's sake, what corporate engineer wants to interact with those blood-sucking fiends down in marketing? But, for all the problems with how they do their jobs, no one else in the Technocracy is willing to do what they do, and the Technocracy cannot function without what they do: budgeting, industrial engineering, accounting, and - of course - marketing.

Members of the Technocratic Conventions
Iteration X	New World Order	Progenitors	The Syndicate	Void Engineers