"The Technocracy is sick." stands in stark contrast with the opening optimism of the NWO book that Progenitors comes out on the heels of. While the New World Order is depicted as optimistic but in many ways fundamentally corrupt, the Progenitors own their corruption in this book, though most of the text still downplays it to allow them to appear as heroes despite many of the terrible things that they are doing in their attempts to "heal" the Union.

Shattered by the Dimensional Anomaly, they've had to build themselves a new way of interacting with the world around them and the Union as a whole. The Progenitors, of all Technocratic groups, are experimenting with democracy in their Convention but at the same time, know that old ways die slowly. They're in many ways more self-aware than the NWO, who view their pathologies as triumphs, and instead they see themselves as sacrificing themselves for the good of the Union when they do horrific things.

The history section is solid and well-told, though nothing that readers of previous Mage books haven't seen before. The views on the other Conventions shows that they have diagnosed many of the Union's problems, and see the Technocratic Civil War and the Nephandic Infiltration issues as the two most pressing things (this is backed up by the opening and closing fiction focusing on bringing in Progenitors who have disappeared and using them to help mend rifts between NWO and Syndicate agents). The views of the Traditions, though, are less rosy than those of the NWO: the Progenitors find very little of value in the Traditions, and the growing Applied Sciences movement is in alignment with Iteration X on reinstating the Pogrom. The "other" section is most interesting, because it indicates that the very basics of Vampires and Werewolves is common knowledge within the Convention.

The Progenitors may be experimenting with democracy, but they're still organized like an academic department, with students, research assistants, primary investigators, etc. One of the most interesting parts of Chapter Two are the "micro" Methodologies, expanding the scope of the Progenitors and each of them just demands a proper fleshing out all on their own.

Much of the darkness of the Progenitors is hidden in the Procedures section, Primal Infusions and Primal Nets are described, and they are used to extract Primal Energy from the dying.

The most novel section is "Genegineered Creatures" which have the statistics for and rules for using fully non-human characters created through genetic tampering, such as uplifted dolphins, lizard people and modern dinosaurs. While a bit harder to justify without the Horizon Constructs, these add something truly new for the Progenitors, and there's hints that some of them might be capable of Enlightenment...so when a player asks "Can I play an Awakened Velociraptor" not only are there rules, but also explanations for why it might not be the best character concept (unless, of course, you plan your game to permit them.)