For me, their pinnacle Inner Mystery is Controlled Metempsychosis. The Druids believed that everyone reincarnates. A mature Diedne has mastered that process. You can kill him, but he'll just come back as someone else, remembering everything. The character even has quite a bit of choice in who. Just because Tremere are paranoid doesn't mean the Diedne aren't out there, with a good memory of everything, including the true value of Guernican honesty.
A critical Diedne Mystery is the ability to keep a secret no matter what. Otherwise, it would have been too easy to capture one of them, wait for Parma to go down, and InMe all the Diedne secrets. Especially if you have one of them imprisoned, say, at Magvillus. This would be the gateway Diedne Mystery. A Diedne's mind is inviolable, immune to any InMe, ReMe, PeMe or similar effect. As a flaw, he also cannot choose to reveal a secret he has agreed to keep. This perfection of mind might include an inability to forget. Such inviolability might appear similar to that of demons...
Between these, you can have what you like. Human sacrifice instead of vis? Something foresty for those D&D druids? Casting parameters for curse-like or blessing-like spells?
This is a really interesting thread. I found this link a couple of weeks ago when I was doing a bit of random research on the Diedne. Its Matt Ryan's Blog and has some interesting perspectives on the house that shall not be named.
Late to the thread due to forum issues, but I would like to raise a dissenting voice to the opinion that House Diedne was a Mystery Cult. I don't deny that it was a very secretive cult, but given its sheer numbers -- it was the largest house at the time of the Schism (HoH:TL, page 40) -- then a Societas seems far more likely. I imagine when the (probably Gaulish) Diedne joined the Order she recruited her own tradition, but also druid-like traditions from all over Mythic Europe. This promoted rapid growth, allowing them to be so big so soon. Since there was no pan-European 'Celtic' culture (that's just a convenient label for historians), all of the recruited druids would have a different religion and different practices -- this in itself makes a Mystery Cult difficult. For a Mystery Cult to work, Diedne would have demanded that druidic priests abandoned their religion in favour of her own brand of idolatry. In a Societas, everyone could be free to worship how they will. I see House Diedne as being much like House Ex Miscellanea but with better leadership: lots of individual sects ruled by a council. It may be that what is known in 1220 as Diedne Magic might just be the magic of one type of druidry, perhaps the Gaulish branch. That Virtue may not have been shared by the whole house; each sect might have had its own Major Virtue, Major Flaw, and Minor Virtue, for example.
There is no doubt that religion was a big part of House Diedne. However, I also disagree that Pagan was an obligatory (or even a common) Flaw. This is a Story Flaw -- you don't take it if you want your character to be pagan, you take it if you want to have stories about your character being pagan. If you have the Flaw, then you won't simply keep your faith quiet like other secret pagans; you bless the Goddess out loud, you openly wear a symbol of your faith, or someone knows your allegiance and persecutes you because of it. Further, it is an exceptionally bad idea to force every player of a (living) house to take a Story Flaw (let alone the same Story Flaw). Each character can only have one Story Flaw, and this basically makes Diedne the 'cookie cutter' house. It is not the same as having all members of the dead house take Dark Secret; by taking the Diedne Magic Virtue in the post-Schism world you are deciding to play a particular type of character.
To Mark:
True that the Diedne numbers make them more probably one Societates centered about Spontaneus, some Mystic approach and related Ethnicity, but i don't see so far difficult the Mystery Cult. Truely the Pagan Flaw ithik taht should be rare, but on another side Cabal Legacy or related minor flaws could be very common (Vow, and so on), very related to the practices. And another thing, Celtic related people were not only on the now France and the Brittish Isles. The Celtics were on Germany, Poland, Iberia, Italian ¡until Greek zone!, and i know that the Celtiberian and Celtic lore still on many historycal and language theme. So, i think taht if not relligiously mayble folklore and language could link them.
The problem is that they do not act like a society us. Yes, they are presented as large, but also as organized, with a common culture. Worse, the fifth edition presents them as being local rather than scattered across Europe. If we assume that the Druids went underground, then the Edney did not need to create a mystery and recruit a large body of people to agree with it and change their ways, but only needed to reach out to the existing network and convince them to add hermetic magic to their tradition.
Yes, by hermetic standards they are large, but bytheirstandardsthey are a lot smaller than they used to be before Caesar came…
Also, by their standards hermetic magic was Probably considered an improvement added to the main body of what they already had, rather than what they already had being an eccentric twist on Hermetic Magic.
I get no such indication from what little there is on House Diedne. I have in the past combed through the Fifth Ed sources and collected quotes on what we do know; I'll see if I can dig this up.
My point is that whereas today we know that the various 'Celtic' people share a common origin, A) I very much doubt that they saw it that way; and B) these cultures were barely extant in the eighth century when the Order formed. It seems unlikely to me that the druids of all these disparate relic populations scattered from Spain to Ireland to Poland to the Balkans had any contact with one another, or that they still shared religo-magical practices after thousands of years of separation.
If Diedne inducted them all into a Mystery Cult, then they would have had to conform to her sect's religious and magical beliefs*, enacting her own "Join or Die" campaign. That's just another form of religious persecution, something that these pagans probably know a lot about. The Romans tried the whole "You can carry on worshipping Ogmios, but you have to call him Hercules" schtick, and look what happened.
*unless she created a syncretic cult from scratch. You've just got to look at Wiccanism to realise what a bad idea it is to design a religion by committee.
My point behind these posts is to provide an alternate view. The version of House Diedne I'm suggesting here would be a societas made of many sects, each a mystery cult. Each sect has its origin in one of the pagan groups that Diedne encouraged to sign up to the Order. Each would have their own Mysteries that are distinct from the others; the commonality is that they are all diehard pagan remnants. There may have been a core of the house which represented Diedne's own tradition. Any pagan sects -- whether 'Celtic' or not -- could have joined; leaving Ex Miscellanea for the non-religious magical groups, plus those religious ones with history of hatred of House Diedne (like the gruagachan). After the Schism War, some of the sects may have joined Ex Misc after renouncing their Diedne past.
When it comes down to it, we know very little about House Diedne and its practices. Since it seems unlikely there will be an official version of the house, each troupe has the freedom to come up with something that satisfies them.
Yeah, on your thought you are very clear and you are right (specially on the last phrase), Diednes can be anything taht any Game/Chronicle/Group/Storyteller needs, that is the correct way.
I think again that the identity on Celtics can be not the same, at least with their near commoun Language and Society to have links through Europe, specially on Mytich Europe. The historically merchant routes that explain som materials on Ancient Celtics places argue at least on that way. But of course not all Original Celtic wizards or priests can be thought be Diedne or become part of the Order in that way.
