The Code has nothing to say on the issue, but I'd point out that it also doesn't say not to have sex with demons (provided you don't pay them anything). Brief codes of law are never comprehensive: they assume that all signatories know that some things aren't allowed.
You can't be Marched, but a couple of dozen disgusted magi can all declare War on you at the same time. So, you can be lynched and lynch mobs are entirely legal under the Code provided they follow the correct forms of ettiquette before killing you.
It is probably about as true as we today can prove it to be. Ie. its probably true but we cant actually be certain of it, as even though its fairly clear that the Romans invented tales about it, that doesnt automatically mean that it didnt also happen and the Romans just managed to come up with a fake accusation that ended up being real.
And that doesnt mean there´s nothing to be retained, as the the Roman accusations were very real indeed even if THEIR truthfulness is probably zero.
:mrgreen:
I've always taken the "don't traffic with demons" clause more broadly than relating to commercial trafficing, so I think that's covered. But Dark Fay or Jotuns aren't demons. The code tends to be tightly defined and excludes moral condemnation, preferring to give practical expression to its requirements -- don't get us in trouble with the mortals, don't piss of the fay, etc.
That's a very good point that the Code accepts private justice provided the forms are followed. Of course, various canonical covenants seem to act terribly to covenfolk and other mundanes (Journey's End in the Alps comes immediately to mind) so I'm not sure whether feeding the occasional grog to the Queen of the Night is really going to get the Order up in arms.
House Tytalus was heavily involved in diabolism just a few decades before the Schism War. They were specifically undertaking a plot to corrupt the entire Order. It was determined that they had produced a number of lab texts, summae, and tractatus designed to spread diabolic corruption, and had loaned these to a number of magi in other houses.
The clean-up phase of the Scourging that involved tracing down connections between House Tytalus' corrupted members and members of other houses was not perfect. House Diedne, unfortunately, had a number of corrupted members who escaped detection. By the end of the 10th century, about ten percent of House Diedne was corrupted, but mostly outside of the British Isles. When combined with the general aloof nature of the house and several separate cases in France and Germany of diabolism revealed, this led to increasing tensions between House Diedne and the rest of the Order.
Between 990 and 1003* Houses Tremere, Flambeau, and Guernicus all began organizing for what they thought to be an inevitable war. They all wanted to be in a far better position than they were when they threw ad hoc groups against House Tytalus' covenants during the Scourging (with several disastrous results). House Tytalus largely assisted the other three houses.
House Diedne, whose leadership in the British Isles had no connection with diabolism, believed the entire matter to be completely blown out of proportion. The simply did not realize the true intensity of feelings among the other houses, a disconnection from the rest of the Order made real by their own practices.
In 1003, the rest of the Order declares official war upon House Diedne. The stated reason is that the house had descended into diabolism due to cross-corruption from House Tytalus.
A few members of Houses Bonisagus, Ex Miscellenea, Jerbiton, Merinita, and Mercere (Gifted) participated. A few Ex Miscellenea and Merinita sympathized with House Diedne and harbored the Order's new enemies. Any caught doing this were executed.
Houses Bjornaer, Criamon, and Verditius did not participate at all.
The Redcaps stopped delivering information to House Diedne after the declaration of war.
House Diedne struck back against the attacks with as much strength as they could muster. In the British Isles in particular, Hermetic magi suffered badly. In the end, House Diedne was completely outnumbered and they were facing the most heavily combat-oriented members of the Order. All known covenants and members of House Diedne, except the top six members (whose bodies were never located), were wiped out.
A number of formerly secret practices of House Diedne were revealed during the Schism War and were found to be disgusting or shocking to the Roman-based houses and membership. In their eyes, this lent post-facto justification to the original declaration of war, especially when so little actual evidence for diabolism was eventually uncovered over the course of the war.
- Houses of Hermes p.141 states the Schism War runs from 1003-1012. Later references use 1004 as the start date. My own entries in my history are based more on HoH than on later sources I only acquired recently.
I happen to like the Stallone analogy... goes to show adding Sly to anything makes it digestible! 
This is my interpretation as well. I see it as an organic, political failure that we've seen time and again in human culture. Alienate someone, point out how strange they are, point out criminal acts of some of the members, paint all members then start shouting "us or them!" to the other Houses.
On a sidenote, didn't the Guernicus jump in to distract attention away from Duresca? Or was that the Tytalus taint... I forget. Either way, everyone had their reasons to pick a side.
This is somewhat questionable. Certainly the Romans were fond of saying that their enemies practiced human sacrifice, and such propaganda is common, look at the propaganda the inquisition put out about the Jews.
There are a number of bog bodies that seem to have been high status individuals executed in some ritual fashion. If this was more of a religious sacrifice or a criminal execution is of course unclear. Of course you could well mix the two, in a more traditional fantasy game you could have priests of the god of justice overseeing executions in a ritual manner, and that could well be considered human sacrifice but a benign form.
Depends on the magi in your story. I had a Magus experimenting by warping people to study how warping can cause people to gain virtues so that he could create spells that granted virtues in a permanent fashion. The solution my players decided was that he was remote enough to not cause much problems with interfering with mundanes and got him to lay off the fairies and let him be.
This is a fairly brutal time after all.
You can be marched for that, remember that there are few laws, if enough people at tribunal decided to march you they can easily stretch something to fit that.
Of course having say 5 or 10 people declare a wizards war at the same time might well be enough of a march to get the job done.
My own particular take is that the Diedne were too big, too powerful, and too secretive. These things were what set off the Magi that were rather paranoid after the discovery of the Tytalus. To the Tremere, some of their suspicions may or may not have been justified, but when they asked/demanded for some verification and were refused that set them off.
To the Tremere this was a chance to recoup some face from the Sundering which wasn't so distant in some of their minds, as well as claim some of the vacated glories that the other House from Guorna lost. They did hate human sacrifice, but they also hated slights to their perceived authority. I believe they followed a pholisophy that Bismarck would later use; "If we must fight, it is better to attack today. Yesterday would have been better, tomorrow may be too late." (or something like that). They could have tried being more peaceful but looked to the endgame of the whole thing and felt there would be a fight no matter what, better to do it now then.
The Flambeau were rather easily convinced in my opionion, since this was not a Latin House and the House was even more aggressive at this time. They wanted a fight and the prospect of fighting an entire House of what they considered outsiders was just what they were looking for.
For the Diedne, the whole lead up was unnecessary and also quite an indignity. They knew they were being singled out because of their size and power and different origins as well as their secrecy. But to be demanded by the youngest original House was truly an affront to them. Did they have Infernalists among them? No moreso than any other House. Did they practice human sacrifice? Yes. How often? Infrequently, only for the highest practices of their Mysteries. But even that was not something that other Houses had a right to know about. When they turned to legitimate authority for redress of their grievances, they found backs turned to them, and knew they were on their own and so pursued the war with all vigour, hoping that their representative at Magvillus would get through to the heads of the Order (and we know what happened to that one).
Regarding the other Houses, some stayed neutral others didn't. I always had that the Ex Miscellenea was about 50/50, plenty in Diedne had upset Hedge traditions that were now in the Order, but some wise Ex Misc saw this as something that could go bad for them as well. So, few Ex Miscellenea actively pursued the Diedne but even fewer helped the Diedne.
For my own game, I determined that while the full house war was probably over kill that it had a fairly decent basis in fact. There were inner mysteries around sacrifice that could be used in a diabolical fashion, and a group of demons had infiltrated the house, and many magi unknowingly took them as familiars.
Of course our covenant found a book that includes diedne mytery lore suma and tractatus. It also includes enough useful books of enough quality to make it something we would be loath to destroy. And copying the books out is not useful as the book is enchanted to provide +2 XP to a related skill when reading(diedne inner mystery related to poetic magic). That book is epic.
There are obviously many possible ways to view the War, but I have to say I find absurd the notion of the Tremere being altruistic enough to cross Europe and take enormous losses just because they're offended by the sacrifice of some Breton peasants. I'm ok with adjusting House Tremere from the bad guy orientation of previous editions but this is a 180 degree turn.
Possibly.
But real people will go a very long way to enforce their morals on others. Why would magi not act like real people?
It's no more absurd than, say, the King of England trying to capture Jerusalem.
If we were talking about the Flambeau I'd agree with you. To me it's just too much of a stretch from the way the Tremere have always been characterized.
In the previous edition,house tremere hoped for the secrets of immortality from Diedne. Forget the previous editions.
It falls very much within the Tremere mindset as I see it - and makes for an excellent reason why they're not doing it these days!
Depends on a lot of things. They could have done what many people who start wars do and think it will be a lot easier than they originally thought, think about statements like "we will be home by Christmas" and so forth. Then there is the issue of how strong their motivation was if they felt they needed to do this because Diedne was a threat to everyone, then they could well decide to act as well. I am not familiar with previous editions but in 5ed they view themselves as the army of the order, while flambue could be better described as special forces, so because they have the organisation to have doctrine and the like they are not at all wrong to view themselves as the most militarily effective.
For a case in point look at WWI. That happened by an large because the various nations wanted it to happen to show who was strongest, the actual excuse used was not terribly important. Then it turned out to be a lot bigger and bloodier than they thought it would be. So why shouldn't there be parallels between WWI and the Schism war?
Also distance is irrelevant to most Magi, as in the games I have played in, they tend to learn leap of homecoming fairly soon after getting out of apprenticeship.
Well now see, THAT makes much more sense to me than an altruistic crusade when we're talking Tremere. I do understand that we're talking about a work of fiction and that the author (or line editor, or whatever) can revise things to make whatever version he wants to be "true". The next book can turn Tremere himself into Francis of Assisi if that's what the author wants. I just don't find it very consistent with anything else that's been written about the House.
Let's look at the Tremere at the start of the 10th century.
They're centered in Transylvania, across Europe from the rest of the Order with a bunch of particularly savage pagan Magyars directly between them and Germany. Getting to the Diedne means pass these people and also two Carolingian successor states. Moreover, Transylvania is surrounded by people practicing bloodthirsty pagan rites. If the Tremere have a compulsion to stomp out blood sacrifice there are people a lot closer they can fight and few if any of these people have the magical power to resist them that the Diedne have.
What do we know about House beliefs? There's no particular emphasis on Christianity or any other religion, unlike the Flambeau who are pretty consistently portrayed as crusader types. They're "Roman" so some sort of Christian background seems in order, but then the Founder was raised by pagans and nothing shows him being born again or the like. Sure, Tremere may have had strong reactions to his old master's nasty habits but remember he's been dead for nearly a century when the Schism War starts.
The House specializes in Necromancy. So apparently abuse of the dead, body and spirit, is perfectly ok for them. This doesn't sound like a House that would explode in moral indignation when someone else sacrifices to cthonic forces.
All in all, there's nothing there that suggests a self-sacrificing compulsion to travel to Brittany and save the poor victims of the Druids. I'll take the "stealing immortality secrets" idea any day, or the "trying to take over the Order" alternative. Or I could believe that the role of the Tremere was exaggerated for whatever reason and that the real forces behind the War were the nearer neighbors of the Diedne.
What I get from HoH: True Lineages is that the bitterness of the Tremere towards the spirits that the pre-hermetic Tremere precursors served as one of the base values of the house. It is hammered into every Tremere during apprenticeship.
I can totally believe that they'd take out the Diedne because of it; the Tremere see themselves as an army that exists in part to protect the order.
Secrets of immortality on the other hand aren't at all viable. First, judging from what we know of the Diedne, these secrets might very well involve the magi supplicating themselves before spirits. For the Tremere that's backwards and repulsive. Second if they want secrets of immortality there are many better choices for them. The Merinita would be happy to accept members interested in the becoming (Quendelon had demonstrated this mystery prior to the schism war). The Criamon would take in people who wish to follow the path of the body (providing that they're willing to work on the project of freeing humanity from the prison of time). Although it might not exist in every version of the setting, the mystery of the living ghost has Tremere written all over it. While not as good of a fit as the living ghost the secret of the greater elixir wouldn't cause the problems with Tremere mindset that a Diedne immortality method would. I can hardly believe that the Tremere of fifth edition are going to forgo all of the other methods of immortality in order to pursue Diedne secrets (even immortality of the forest and Sayoshyant's elixir are better fits for them).
I'll grant you that the immortality thing is pretty tenuous given everything else written about immortality in AM5. Generalizing the thesis to stealing some kind of magical secret from the Diedne still makes more sense to me than altruism in this situation.
Hostility towards the specific spirits that did whatever they did to young Tremere might be a good story. I hadn't heard it suggested before that the Diedne might be worshipping these particular entities, but who knows. The Tremere reaction would be less an altruistic one than "It's that Charon bastard again. We've got a score to settle", which seems more in character.
I view it as purely a political fight. Diedne was a large house that also voted in blocks and thus was the main political enemy of the Tremere at Tribunals. Diedne lost the war of information because they were secretive and Tremere were able to get several houses to join them in this fight.