Reading
@notanautomaton's stuff I was thinking about basically a more drastic nuAscension.
I don't think a single canon explanation is necessary for a nAscension, or even desirable. Instead, it should be a toolkit, like Grim War, which provided options and plot hooks for every single faction in the setting being heroes, questionable shades of grey, or villains. The setting itself is basically "the modern day, but with wizards and paradigm responsible for stuff." This leads you to have a very good level of room as to who is actually responsible for what. The second thing is I kind of dislike the bipolar nature of mage-there are two superpowers, the Technos and the Trads, they fight (sometimes like NATO and the USSR, sometimes like WW2).
What I'd prefer is that the Ascension War is a multipolar conflict, like The Great Game on steroids or a multiplayer RTS clusterfuck. You have large, powerful factions which keep making temporary alliances as goals tie together, drifting apart, and this political game shapes consensus. It's no longer Wizard Democrats versus Republican Witches or whatever, but instead a dynamic alliance system makes it more plausible that these powerful forces both
aren't shaping most of society and leaves room to explain why the dominant strains of thought change fairly regularly.
So the Technocracy gets split into two groups. The first would be ItX/VEs/Progenitors, the objectivists (yeah my name is bad, sue me). Their basic tenet is that there is an objective set of laws to the universe, and 'consensus,' as it were, is the unconscious psychic power of humans or something changing the laws of reality. As you might have noticed, this is a change from canon. They now explicitly sort of (but not fully) know they're fucking with consensus and changing human belief. Are they right? Are they wrong? That's up to the ST.
Then you have the sovereigns, who think being Awakened is justification to rule. They absorb a bit of the Hermetics and become the Illuminati/NWO/Barvarian conspiracy theories, combining the high-tech conspiracy stuff with the shady mystic symbolism that comes along for the ride with the NWO.
The Traditions generally get split even further. You'll have intersectional Traditionalists who are basically fighting for their own beliefs to be recognized and validated in consensus (i.e. saving their local consensus), the religious who believe that they're granted powers by their religion (the groups here probably don't get along), the postmodernist Traditions who believe in observation > facts (parts of the Etherites, VAs, and Akashics), the mystic religions who believe in an alternate mystical consensus with spirits but an axiomatic, almost scientific view of the world (Heeermetics), so on and so forth. All of these guys get to be more or less great powers in their own right.
The Nephandi and Euthanatos get combined into like, Reincarnationists who believe that the world must be broken to build a new one in the ashes, and Mar
The thing is, these groups are all independent rather than in the NATO/WarPact blocs of Mage canon. This makes the world, I think, more dynamic, and lets you have a lot more room to have fun. So right now, in 2016, the Sovereigns and the Christian magi (I really need better names) are working together, because the Sovereigns dumped the Objectivists a while ago in favor of strengthening religion to keep on top, and the religious took that chance-but now they're squabbling with each other. The Intersectionalists are getting in with minority rights
I think it gets the Ascension War's
essence better-philosophical knife fights-and the temptation of power and hubris are both featured here, as well as the idea of having oddball parties and fighting colorful bad guys.
I definitely agree that Mage would be a lot more interesting if it had more factions. On the other hand, I'm personally kind of skeptical of having the objectivists play up the consensus angle--I would actually rather that
no one knows the details of the Consensus except maybe some postmodern near-Marauder groups, since it plays up the paradigm warfare aspect more. As a matter of fact, most factions shouldn't really even have a a clear distinction between the awakened and non-awakened--Mages really are just "superhumans", doing things better than normal humans.
As for factions, I've actually given some thought to this in the past.
I don't think the
Technocracy needs to be split up completely like you're suggesting--the Syndicate and especially NWO just need to have their thematic focuses shifted around a bit. They're still probably the largest conspiracy around (mostly because it's one of the few that's truly global and
remained truly global after the end of colonialism), but it's much more of a first among equals thing than the dominance they have in Mage.
Iteration X, the Progenitors, and the Void Engineers: Largely the same of canon, but with some methodologies switched around. In particular, ItX should have a dedicated Materials Science/Chemistry research methodology, and the Void Engineers should get some more emphasis placed on their physics research.
The New World Order: NWO probably needs the most drastic change to excise most of the spiritualism/mysticism stuff like the Harbingers of Albion or their Templar origins that are associated with it in canon--it should be more reflective of the actual New World Order conspiracy, that is, that a modern global liberal elite is controlling our minds through surveillance and information. I think the best way to do this is to deemphasize the Operatives in favor of Ivory Tower and the Watchers (who should be split into a SIGINT/ELINT methodology and a news/media control and propaganda methodology). Borrow heavily from things like CFR/Rand Corporation and cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.
The Syndicate: Likewise, the pseudo-corporate structure of the Syndicate should be done away with--they're bankers and economists first and foremost, the International Bankers conspiracy controlling world financial institutions. The corporate world as a whole is still very much everyone's game.
The Difference Engineers: The Virtual Adepts should be retained as part of the Technocracy as their Formal Sciences division--they're mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists.
Next up we have
Leviathan, the
second child of the Order of Reason. They're pretty similar to the "sovereigns" you're suggesting, a 1/3 to 1/2 or so of the Order of Reason that split off when the Order/Technocracy decided to become secular and reject overt Christian mysticism (They're basically the Etheric Biologists ES described in that one TradWiki article for Panopticon). They're kind of like super-Etherites--they have a slightly anachronistic aesthetic, although in this case it's because they're technological resources are more limited since the Technocracy made off with the lion's share of the scientists, forcing them to use older OoR designs (they have high-tech gadgets of their own, but they're almost all narrowly espionage-focused devices because of their limited scientific establishment). The mysticism and hyper-conspiracy elements of the NWO can mostly be spun off here--their subgroups are the
Priory of Sion, their political/religious division, the
Craftmasons, their science/engineering division, the
Knights Templar, their military/espionage division, and the
Rosicurian Order of the Mysterium, dedicated to studying mysticism, procuring and hoarding occult artifacts, and the like. Leviathan is very paradigm open and tends to approach reality deviance by studying and incorporating it if it works--they're basically halfway Hermetics at this point. They're also the conservative/reactionary counterpoint to the Technocracy, still overtly Christian and West European and fancying themselves as aristocrats and philosopher-kings.
In addition to those two, we have the
Dominion Church, a ecumenical religion centered around Awakened people that dates back to ancient Persina times and the Zoroastrians. Dominion believes in a two-tiered system of revelation--God doesn't particularly care about the specifics of what the sleepers believe as long as they worship one god, and he has chosen only the Elect (Awakened) to know his true nature and protect sleeper belief from the masses. Dominion itself is relatively small, but it has a lot of influence over world religions, playing on the old conspiracy theory that things like the leadership of the Catholic Church are not really Christian but part of an older mystery cult. Most of its power actually comes from various "affiliate organizations"--genuinely sleeper-religious groups of mages, sorcerers, or hunters that Dominion manipulates, mostly Christian, Islamic, or to a lesser extent Hindu. The Order of Reason potentially actually started as one of these.
Dominion actually got
extremely close to achieving Mass Ascension by making enough people believe in an omnipotent god that an omnipotent god almost actually came into being (this is the goal of their secret A6+ masters)--the Order of Reason unknowingly screwed this up in the eleventh hour. They're also actually descended from the same Zoroastrian roots as the Hermetics, although you should never tell them that.
The
Wu Lung are still around in China--I'd envisioned them basically as described in my writeup, except for the fact that in this case the Five Elemental Dragons splinter faction is much smaller, and the remaining mystical Wu Lung are still very influential and actively contesting control of China with the Technocracy. There should be a similar group in India rooted in traditional Hindu mythology, and probably one/several in sub-Saharan Africa as well.
Likewise, the
Hermetics are still around in Europe and still somewhat politically influential in their own right. They're increasingly growing closer to Leviathan to the point that it's sometimes a bit hard to tell their paradigms apart if one forgets about the hypertech.
Beyond that you have the
Council of Traditions which largely represent traditionally marginalized cultures across the world. It should be noted that this does not mean "groups oppressed by Europeans"--organizations that were traditionally
dominant in their homeland's political or mystical spheres like the Wu Lung and Hermetics would never have joined the Traditions. Interestingly enough this actually makes them more similar to the Disparates of canon, and they should absorb several Disparate groups while shedding some of their own members. There are probably hundreds of small traditions--the Council is just a vaguely UNish body they use mostly to talk shop. The Choristers are especially notable Traditionalists simply because they're Dominion defectors.
You also have various religious mages who aren't coopted by the Technocracy/Leviathan/Dominion, but most of them are smaller groups--they're too splintered over doctrinal issues to really become a major force on their own, with the Protestant and Catholic mages and the Sunni and Shia mages and so forth fighting each other just as much as everyone else. On top of this, you have Banisher groups from your old writeup who align themselves with paradox--most of these are not organized, although there are a couple that actually manage to be a slightly threatening force (I kind of have a vague idea of Majestic 12, interacting with paradox spirits by thinking they're aliens, for one).
Then finally you have various postmodernist/solipsist groups, where the line between mage and outright marauder often starts to get very blurred, and the reincarnationists/Nephandi who should no longer be babyeatingly evil but rather people who just genuinely believe that this world sucks so much it needs to be brought to an end. Maybe to start over, maybe to not exist at all.
da fuq? 
" and "
shit's lethal, 
how the fuck do we work magic?! 
" while 2e was a spectrum of "
I get this 
