Chapter Eight: The Arsenal
Half of this chapter is spells, half of it is stuff.
Spells first. Technocrats call their it's-science-not-magic magical tricks Procedures. Technically you can use sphere magic to make up anything you want, but you get a slight bonus for using established (meaning that you found it in a book) procedures. However most people don't care about that, what the listing of procedures is actually useful for is to give both players and GMs and idea of the kinds of things you can do and how many dots you might need to do them.
As a list of examples goes this is woefully short, but it includes some decent examples - how to use Forces to get more damage out of your gun, and how to neuralize people are both on the helpful list. Helpfully this doesn't include any of the ludicrously high-dot examples that made it into many mage books and you would never ever get the chance to use. None of these require more than three dots in any particular spheres, though many require two or more spheres. So starting characters can actually use these things.
try not to use this one too much
Now they actually need a lot more examples, like dozens more but these ones mostly don't suck and are mostly in a reasonable point on the power scale.
And then we have devices. Obviously these are important. The only archetype that wants magic items more than wizards are artificers. Tony Stark is a character you can totally play as a Technocrat. Devices have to be in the game. The list in this book is quite short, but that's kind of justified in that Technomancer's Toybox (which is one of the most gloriously ridiculous books in the entire oWoD catalog since it's the one with stats for military hardware in the appendix) had come out the year before and it had a lot of Technocratic stuff in it.
Anyway, these devices range from cheeky Bond gadgets to hulking power armor. It also includes several energy weapons. Here's the thing though, the rues for how you use artifact weapons in Mage have never been made clear. These weapons have their own arete rating - meaning they do their own magic - but it's not clear precisely what you role that for, and how it interacts with things like extra successes from ordinary attack roles. This matters because it you invested 10 points in backgrounds to have your own NSN Plasma Caster, you want to know just how fine the particular ash you're going to leave behind from all dead vampires will be.
this thing clearly does a lot of damage, but it would be nice to know just how much
Of course the weapons have nothing in the overpowered department compared to the enhancements. Would you like to be Wolverine? Because that is a thing that you can do with enough background points. You could also be Aquaman if you wanted, and pretty much anything in between.
Oh, and just because they could, they threw in some vehicle stats for things like deadly attack helicopters and supersonic military fighters. This is like stating out archdevils -it's so not necessary. If you're using them, you're already so far off the RNG stats are irrelevant.
Appendix
The book concludes with a list of sources, a mixture of books, film, and TV. It's an interesting list and at this point is a fun bit of nostalgia about where this sort of thing was at in the late 90s. Looking back, it's also interesting to see how Guide to the Technocracy in some ways mirrors VtM in being slightly ahead of trend.
Worth noting: CSI premiered in Oct 2000 and launched 15 years of Technocrats roaming all over CBS and spawned about ten thousand imitators. This book was referencing The X-Files and the still ongoing La Femme Nikita. An explosion of spy thrillers, cop shows about weird technological trickery, and even fighting the paranormal were all coming. The stuff in this book matches the tropes in a lot of them.
One particular example is worth noting:
This particular piece of 2002 anime is so Technocracy it hurts. The mysterious enforcement agency that hunts witches, the agents having trouble trusting their superiors, the Virtual Adept hacker they caught reprocessed and are making work for them. Witch Hunter Robin hit the theme, the mood, the aesthetics, everything. It even hit the all-important 'Goth Gamer Girls dig it' criterion. That's important when it comes to trying to convince the female gamers who found vampire, but not D&D, appealing to play something else. Anecdotally, every Technocracy game I've run had more female players than male.
The bottom line is that the storyteller system is generally bad and the Mage sphere magic system is particularly bad, but everything else about the Technocracy is better than it's fellow storyteller system games, and you can still goth hard if you want to. Any oWoD game requires you to get past the mechanics, but if you do that the Technocracy actually leaves you with a halfway decent game to play via the fluff and the structure and that's more than can be said for pretty much all the others. The ultimate evidence is that between 1999 and 2017 there have been several other games - perhaps most obviously the Laundry RPG - that have basically made another Technocracy game. It's a pretty worthy well, shame about the sphere magic though.
Hilarious Coda: even as Technocratic type storytelling was all over the airwaves in the 2000s with shows like 24 and Alias and Bond came roaring back in 2006 with Casino Royale, the Technocracy was completely eliminated when it came to producing the nWoD.