This went off the tracks – but in an interesting way, so I’ll allow it.
The Elmerite Order
So, it turns out that the worldview found in first edition Mage: The Ascension is not entirely inaccurate, after all. Magic works; there are various Traditions that can manipulate it; but one paradigm (scientific rationalism) is so dominant that the others cannot operate freely on our plane of existence. Fair enough… as far as that goes.
Where it all breaks down is why this state of affairs has occurred. You see, the scientific-rationalist mages (we’ll just call them Scientists for short from now on) didn’t actually want to hamper the other Traditions, and the other Traditions aren’t being suppressed by them either explicitly or implicitly. It’s just that about five hundred years ago there was some sort of… incursion… into our reality, and the only way to fight it was to bolster one Tradition to the point where it could consistently and unerringly define what our reality actually was. The other Traditions reluctantly concluded that the Scientists had the most robust model, so the Scientist model was the one that the mages used. And it worked! …At the cost of virtually suppressing pretty much all other forms of magic.
And so we come to the current day. The Elmerite Order specializes in… esoteric loopholes. They’re looking for places in the math and the physics where magic might be usefully inserted, or even grafted; progress is slow, but potentially very rewarding. The tricky part is in creating magical grafts that won’t cause the occult equivalent of immune system tissue reaction: the current Scientist paradigm is robust enough to withstand an egregious violation of the rules, but the mages who are actively trying to fiddle the metaphysical books at ground zero might not be so fortunate. And, unfortunately: ‘ground zero’ is not always a metaphor. A misstep by the Order won’t blow up a city, but it can certainly blow up a room.
The Elmerite Order is not particularly large, as such things go: in the United States there are the usual chapter-houses in Baltimore, Chicago, and Providence, but generally the Order prefers to work via correspondence and links, rather than by direct contact. For one thing, it keeps them familiar with technology. For another, it minimizes any damage that might happen when reality slaps back…