"Euro-American," he said, of which Australia oddly enough is part. 
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I totally agree with Brin, fwiw.
His essay about the immorality of Star Wars is so dead on.
I'd like to suggest that the classic Australian trope, although it can include the single hero, is one in which a group face the wilderness. White Australia has always been hugely urbanised, and so the other and the battle for survival on the frontier have been part of our imagination.
In this I'm thinking of the Steele Rudd stories, Harp in the South, Picnic at Hanging Rock, all that sort of thing.
Whether this fixation on the bush has been healthy for our national psyche is another question.
...is binge drinking ne'er do wells.
Not sure that I buy that. Maybe for an individual story that is the case, but in the context of a saga, ArM is more like the Arthur-cycle (and similar Norse sagas, etc, equivalents) whereby there are a bunch of heros congregated about a central figure/location. The "typical" ArM saga is about a collective of heros congregated around the covenant, rather like the Arthur-cycle is about a collective of knights congregated around Camelot.
Althought, the typical covenant is not much like a hero castle (strong, independent, dominating its environ, etc). A typical covenant is more like a monastery than a castle, in that it is both isolationist from its immediate material surroundings, but connected politically (and possibly materially) to remote daughter/mother sites and a pan-European bureaucracy.
I agree with the arthurian paralel. However, arent most arthur stories about a hero individual facing enemy/siutuation/danger X or Y? Then this gets inserted in a wider picture, but the individual stories and saga arcs are build around single heroic figures doing their stuff and searching for their own goals, on their own.
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? I suspect that Australia is big enough to have more than one classic trope, and sufficiently related to other cultures to have inherited other classic tropes from them.
For what it's worth, we in America also have a classic trope about facing the wilderness, either alone or in a group, either changing it or being changed by it. (Jaws, Dances with Wolves, Snowbound, Deliverance, Last of the Mohicans, My Side of the Mountain, Walden...) I suspect both (very similar) cultures come by it for similar reasons: We both have a vast hinterland, we both are separated from the Old World, we both have had a conflicted history with peoples who settled the land earlier...
I also suspect that Australia and America share another classic trope, of being especially distinct, even unique, we more so than you, or at least louder about it.
In the Arthurian mythos, insofar as I recall, the Round Table never manages to get much done acting as a group. It has always seemed to me to be a holding company of individual heroes, different from the Justice League which could and did operate well as either a group or as individuals. (Of course, all superheroes are Jewish, which adds a different set of tropes to the table. /3824)
This is one of his recurring points, and one I largely agree with.
And the structure of the article is "Most speculative fiction authors are fools, with only a small group (including me) showing the way to solve the problem!".
It's really hard to get away from that narrative.
Seconded.
Oh wait... Thirded? Fourthed?
:mrgreen:
LOL
Remember the battles... there are battles and battles and more battles. When they are to start, Arthur (or another member of the round table) tries to collect as many followers of Arthur as possible. Then they fight. (My reference is Malorys "Le morte d´Arthur"). I think, the comparison of Arthur´s round table and house Tremere is not bad.
Chiarina.
By the way... what do I have to do, to quote someone and get a quote-box with author-announcement?
Put the name in quotations marks.
Done. Thank you very much.
Chiarina.
One of my favorite movies, the Wyler version of "Ben-Hur," is stuffed with competent characters. Even the antagonist of the piece makes only one mistake (never send Charlton Heston to die offscreen; he'll only come back.) This is no longer about Tremere, but definitely is an American work with a heroic lead contending against some very capable people. Pilate gets some of the best lines, from a certain point of view. I think, though, that this is an exception that proves the rule.
I think the issue is more about lazy storytelling than anything else. If the good guys are incompetent in the first half and the bad guys incompetent in the second, things flow so much easier.
(The RPG that best models this kind of storytelling is probably FATE: Heroes spend the first half of the story deliberately losing to gather up fate points to spend in the climactic battles.)
I think you're on to something here but I don't think it necessarily comes down to east vs. west or other larger cultural splits. It's more of a genre thing. Wizards in fiction and myth don't tend to be cogs in machines. In general, Medieval stories seldom are about cogs in machines either. So wizardly cogs in machines just don't feel right to be within the Ars Magica setting. Since the two things that attract me to AM are medieval culture and fiction about wizards, this matters to me.
This is completely separate from the undeniable fact that the idea of the heroic individual is overused in popular Euro-American fiction way beyond the point of cliche. Give me a Cold War spy game and I'm happy with the idea of playing cogs in the machine.
Depends on what you mean by "Arthur stories", of course. But if we mean the later Romance stories (i.e 1100s and onwards) about Lancelot, etc. Then sure, individual stories "star" individual knights, but they usually interact with some of the other "knights of the round table" and/or King Arthur. And what the knights are doing, and why (and even nominally why the story is told or recorded at all) is because the knights are the "knights of the round table".
But back to Tremere...
I do like the new Tremere. They can still be played as Magi In Black, and that works. But they can be played in other ways too, and not necessarily monolithic. The two ladders to power, by promotion and by force, along with tantalizing comments about conflicts among senior Tremere (such as their having to tread carefully due to the Primus' having control over Coeris and her resources) suggest the possibility of internal conflicts every bit as intense as their Tytalus cousins'.
I've even played one.
I think the Tremere get one of the best House writeups. The chapter doesn't have much in the way of useful 'crunch', however: The benefits given to Tremere at different levels of power are insignificant for many sagas (the notion of setting scale for low, normal, high and legendary power probably had not yet happened), and there isn't much in the way of rules, virtues and flaws for anyone to grab. But the Tremere are a lot more interesting than "Cerebrus, what are we going to do this Tribunal?" "Same thing we do every Tribunal...")
A saga of inter-Tremere rivalries and agendas might be very interesting.
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Having been running a lot of fluffy one on one games with a player who plays a Tremere, oddly I have had to become as erudite in the Tremere as the player is. While our games have no XP attatched to them ((not fair to play without the rest of the troupe and benefit from it)) they do sometimes have influence on the story for the group as a whole, and as such some Tremere things being introduced have been precisely this.
The player's character is a student of the leader of Gigas in the Theban Trib, the higher ups, a bit disliking some aspects of how the Theban trib is being set up with one Tremere to rule them all, have decided the player's Tremere needs training. REALLY far away from the Theban Trib! 
What ensues tests the player and I wont say too much because they are occasional readers of this board, but needless to say once you start having to come up with stories of depth for Tremere about Tremere and with Tremere you certainly learn that the House is not what most people think it is. There are so many magi without any true power of their own so often they tend to create their own power situation in which they can thrive. Now look at the higher ups, at some point you have magi with control of half a dozen or more other magi and all the schemes must line up or there is chaos. So how involved does a overlord Tremere get into their underling Tremere's lives? Only a 
storyguide knows.
I think AtD really expanded on what the Tremere would be doing. Even though there are a lot of"plots" they all have the same goals. They are convinced that the Tremere have the better form and want to convince the other Houses that it is so. Nothing in AtD seems to say they were forcing their view on the Order. I think the controlled Chaos plots would work better with Tytalis Cabals.
Now a younger Tremere may not understand why they are secretly assassinating a minor noble but they do not have to as long as they are good soldiers. 
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But they dont all have the same goals. Certainly they all claim to have the same goal, but can all these powerful and possible 100 plus year old magi truly be in full compliance with each other towards a single goal? I doubt it. I think most of them believe in the Tremere way and vision, but I also thing there is a lot of in fighting and intrigue and politics. And then this gets extended to the lower new magi who have almost NO power at all to be self-determining.
All the other magi in the Order can determine their own paths and goals in life, but not the Tremere. They cannot even vote their own minds unless they have won their sigil. So this sort of structure MUST breed some lower Tremere who in the shadows play their own games of power and intrigue, if for no other reason than to distract themselves from their own inept existence.
Hi, I'm the guy running the Tremere Portianitor is writing about; this is my first time playing a Trem, which I never would have done before this edition, because now I think they're awesome. I've been looking for a chance to post in this thread for a while, but various factors have kept me away, so here goes.
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I think it's very interesting that in 5th edition, the Tremere are described as being one of the most stable and dependable houses, but judging from earlier posts here, the baggage of previous editions has not been shed by many players. This isn't necessarily bad, but I do find it interesting; I'm playing a Trem in Thebes, so that mistrust is entirely justified.
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I have boiled down the new Tremere philosophy thusly: they still want to rule the world, but now they want to be asked.
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The magical focus in certamen is so not a big deal to me; if your character concept hangs on whether or not you can choose a magical focus for your PC, I think you're being too inflexible.
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Everyone acts like you have no freedom if your playing a young Tremere; most of the time, my maga has to give up one season a year to fulfill her duties, which to me is not so much to ask. Plus she's a true believer, so it's not so bad; sure she grumbles from time to time and has developed a sardonic sense of humor about it all, but that's what I see in military people all the time. She has the freedom to pursue her own pursuits, with the knowledge that there is a huge military bureaucracy behind her to catch her if she falls, assuming of course she's kept her nose clean.
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The Tremere are rather embarrassed by their past; Lycanon sounds like hangout of a Bond villain or the Ministry of Magic in the Potter films, and the House seems to find it pretty tacky. Nowadays they use it mostly as a storage and manufacturing facility, like the huge warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, out of sight form everyone else. If they could get rid of the giant statues of the Founder, they would, but it sounds like they would magically defend themselves. Yes, the events leading up to the Sundering were morally repugnant, but that was over two hundred years prior to the default setting. Will people still not trust the Germans hundreds of years after World War II? Perhaps this is the case.
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The Tremere remind me of a cross between the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union, in terms of organization, aesthetics and their focus on spreading a personal philosophy.
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Even after all I've said above, yes it's true: only a fool would trust House Tremere blindly
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Agreed.
A magical focus is nice (and awesome) and an excellent way of defining a character's style/interests.
But ofcourse you can have the same character without the focus.
Exactly!
Even better, if she makes the right knds of requests in return, odds aren't bad that the resources they provide in return make up for that lost season!
This is pretty much straight out of Against the Dark
Let's see, it's been about 70 years (little more since the invasion, little less since they left). We share a border with germany, so obviously we were invaded. But most of the nation has moved on - I hear more grumples about german tourists these days that invading armies. Errr... wait...
editted due to missing [
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