No so much "wrong" as "There's no good reason to nail this down." I do have to say I'm not quite clear on why we feel then eed to cut the pagans a break. Why can't the druids kill people? Why do they have to be nice by modern Christian standards of nice?
Oh, come on: when people talking Ars mention Tremere fascism, they don't mean fascism. They are using it as a shorthand for Evil. Preferably with black uniforms, eagles and genocide.
My point is that fascist states need an external and perpetual enemy, so the Diedne do not work for them as the required bugbear.
Socialism for a value of socalism that's not at all like communism. You don't think that fascists, historically speaking, have tended to be strongly anti-communist? My point is that fascists deny class conciousness. The Saxon peasants of Transylvania are encouraged to be class conscious.
See, this definition is too weak, because you can fit many of the monarchies of the West straight in here, and certainly the Byzantines as well. "Nationalism" as a concept is hard, because you don't have nation states, but the whole point of the Feudal system is to gear the economy of the state to create a perpetual caste of ruler-soliders who are the warrio elite, supported by a class of freedemn whose status is sustained by their armed service. You don't get "total war" in the modern sense, but England, which is the clearest example, is a state that is designed specifically as an expansionisy military machine, differing from modern militaristic states mostly in its lack of communication and logistical technology (and a lack of Americans willing to send in peacemakers.)
The Tremere aren't expansionists. They were, a few hundred years ago. They aren't now. Does a lack of expansionism muck with your idea, here? Would you argue the Spanish Franco regime weren't proper fascists because they never tried to invade France?
For you, Sparta is a fascist state? The Edo period Japanese were a fascist state? Doesn't that rather devalue the term? I'm not saying they are fluffy fun people, but I am saying that it seems to tie in modern ideas to the mediecal setting, when you could just say that the Tremere are a military culture. Given that there are fewer than 100 of them, I'm not sure the panopaly of fascism, which is after all a popular movement that controls the government of large areas, is possible with so few.
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No, I didn't, because sarcasm doesn't translate well in text, and I have seen you argument with the same strength and acidity, so I assumed you were for real.
Sorry Direwolf, you got me too. 8)
OK tremere arn't facists, they're Zerg. For the hive... err House!
I liked them better when they were small, untrusted, and tring to redeem themselves from the Vampirism debacle.
The new tremersws are extremely cool. I really like them. The hate comes from those pesky british pseudo-cunning folk that still hate them for smashing their blood-loving cult of barbarians 
.... and from the fact that in previous edition they were the default bad guy in town by description and behaviour in canon supplements.
In the current edition the role of total hateful teenage jerks seems to have fallen in the tytalus house. A totally uninteresting house IMO, but hey. Other people like them. I guess. 
The Tremere revamp was a masterpiece IMO, turning a cliche bad guy house into a really interesting organization. You should be wary of them because they are organized: even if individually they might be less powerful than you, together they will shred you to pieces in any area (political, research or physical) if they need to. They are a stronghold of the Order of Hermes. What this exactly means is upo to your troupe to decide.
Cheers,
Xavi
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[quote="Timothy Ferguson"]
Oh, come on: when people talking Ars mention Tremere fascism, they don't mean fascism. They are using it as a shorthand for Evil. Preferably with black uniforms, eagles and genocide.
[quote]
As opposed to Crosses and Bibles? I don't understand the romanicism of the church. Sorry.
I find Tremere hard to play because I find it hard to see a Magi that would suffer a master, never the less an entire House of them.
Magi are questioning the universe. They use the scientific method, prior to its invention, by experimenting to figure out the universe. This is a person that questions the nature of reality itself, is intrigued by the answer, and immediatly has more questions.
This is not a person that takes what they hear at face value. This is not a person that accepts "Do it 'cause I said so" This is not a person that I thinks meshes well with a strict heirarchy and collective mindset.
I see Tremere as very boring with a lot of obligations. When you are with your Masters you stand around and do nothing until you are given a mission. You do your mission, maybe with your covenant, that probably won't help 'cause you can't talk about it in detail, nor share the spoils. You probably are assisting someone else anyway and won't be trusted to do a mission on your own for a while.
You can't vote at tribunal, so any sort of politics outside of the house is right out as an option for roleplay.
I doubt Tremere are any fun until maybe 10 years out of apprenticeship.
Speaking from the PoV of an hardcore Diedne fan, there are various reasons. First, pagans do not appear to be burdened with a record of organized human rights violations and intolerance anywhere as massive as the monotheistic religions. Second, there is very little evidence that druids did kill people in a way quantitatively or qualitatively different from the generous use that monotheistic cultures did of capital punishment (i.e. that the sacrifices were not either voluntary, or a way of executing criminals), or from the way other mages eagerly hunt down and harvest sapient supernatural creatures for vis, or that the amount of corruption among the Hermetic druids was in any way worse than in any other Houses. Given these reasons, it is very difficult to view the actions of Tremere in any other way than way-hypocrite mass-murdering paranoia fed by their own Roman bigotry, power-greed, and hive-mentality, that endengered an act way worse than anything else they were purposely fighting against. Even more so since the Tremere have a proven record of treachery against the Order, the evidence is lacking that the Diedne ever did the same, until the Tremere engineered their extermination.
To this motives, add that some gamers (such as yours truly) may feel strong interest for the kind of magical practices the Diedne focused on, and so feel annoyed and defensive against the kind of vicious Mercurian cultural obscurantism that the Tremere defend (the Diedne gave Bonisagus a frigging one-third of his magical system and all of its flexibility, as spell-casting is concerned; the Tremere gave oh... hum... well... a trick to establish a pecking order. Really).
From this reasoning, these gamers come to the sad conclusion that the wrong House was cast out in the Schism War, and the Hermetic Nazis/Borgs/MiBs were allowed to win.
For my two, rather clipped, coins worth, the Tremere are fascists, or at least fascistic. Which, as an aside, is not in my experience used to mean evil, but to mean authoritarian and draconian.
The Tremere hold that strength comes through unity, and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They believe in maintaining strength, and in the superiority of their ways. They are explicitly militaristic, and they do have an external enemy against whom they rail and whom they use as a rod to encourage unity; they have two, in fact, given their rivalry with the Tytalus. Whilst the Diedne are not visible enemies, the invisible, potential enemy is just as useful, if not more so.
What they are not is Nazis or any other form of modern political movement. They are, rather, the idealised fascists that these movements wished to achieve. The whole of the order is strongly fascist (You have only to look at the fasces in the logo of the Order itself, or their fondness for the old "Join or Die!" policy), but the Tremere have made it their focus and they do it better than anyone else. Ultimately, I suspect that this is because they're not real. Real political movements of this form attract the powerhungry, the desperate and the corrupt and inevitably turn to malevolent dictatorships, whilst the Tremere have largely remained benevolent.
As for the relative merits of the Diedne and the Order as it stands, both are pretty repugant by any reasonable (read "my" ::grins: modern moral viewpoint. Nevertheless, there exists no canon proof on whether the Diedne did or did not do anything wrong beyond refuse to surrender their religious beliefs at a time when the order, as with all political organisations, needed an enemy against which to unify itself. And they lost.
Sure, because militarist totalitarian "civilized" organizations that implement organized hate campaigns and large-scale mass-murder to preserve cultural purity and aggrandize themselves in the process are so much cooler instead.
Alas, this frequently is. I know too many scientists who simply don't care about anything outside their speciality and are happy to be told what to think and do. Try telling them their pet theory on their work is wrong and they'll blow up at you, but tell them that the jews eat babies, the homosexuals want to have their own television channel broadcasting pornography during kiddy tv hours or that vaccines kill and lead to sexual deviancy and they'll accept it at face value and ask what you want them to do about it.
That, and academic politics and hierarchy is vicious in the extreme. The mathematicians look down on the physicists who sneer at the chemists, all of whom cordially despise the engineers, whilst the engineers regard them as deluded wasters, and the social scientists regard them as crude and inelegant, scarcely civilised. The Order's houses are very realistic in that regard. The internal divisions even more so - getting a solid state physicist and his group to agree with an astrophysicist on something as trivial as tea room opening hours is nearly impossible simply because their differing specialities make them regard each other as foreign and untrustworthy.
...
You agree then that a militaristic organization of highly organized scientists with a clear pecking order is HIGHLY unlikely?
Indeed 
LOL
Xavi
No. I agree that an highly structured, militaristic organisation of indoctrinated quantum physicists is highly believable, especially if told they need to stick together to stop the Creationists taking over the national teaching curriculum, and that they'll be sure that they will eventually lead others to adopt their clearly superior ways.
My analogy, such as it was, was to show that intelligent, indepenent thinkers are just as prone to slipping into us vs them mindsets as anyone else, and to freely asign control of aspects of their lives to others so they don't have to worry about it.
Yes, ancient Rome was a nice happy place where everyone was treated equally, dissenters were not executed and there were not thousands of crucifixions along the Appian way. And the Vikings, Odin worshippers were peaceful champions of human rights, protectors of the weak and downtrodden.
Not that Christians or any other social group is 100% innocent. But eriously, where in history outside of the neo-pagan movements of the modern era, where in history did these pagan peace loving human rights champions exist?
Though I am not a supporter of Capital Punishment by any means, there is a wide magnitude of difference between punishment for crimes and religious sacrifice.
And the Diedne were not Druids. The Diedne are a fictional creation based on druids, with the back story that they were ostracized and shunned by the real druids for some unknown reason.
No such thing as other magi except in the context of fiction. And no matter how sapient a creature is, it isn't human. Humans have souls. IC, creatures do not.
Compared to the Tytali, you may have a point. The difference is that House Tytalus opened their doors and allowed a thourogh investigative purge. Other Houses were ameniable to inspection. The Diedne did not cooperate, probably because they wanted to hide their own crimes
That's my take on it.
How about viewing them the way as written? Dedicated and stalwart, self sacrificing heroes of the Order. They paid the price, over half their numbers dies in that War.
They committed human sacrifice. I doubt the Order was dued into believing that, because powerful magics can be used to probe minds and summon ghosts for interrogation. That is all that is needed.
Now, technically human sacrifice is not a violation of the code. If you want to go down that road, it is much more interesting. I used that angel in a story I ran several years ago.
Granted, and play your game however you desire. Do note that some gamers (such as yours truly) really don't like that sort of thing at all. Some of us prefer the Roman centric houses and Christian or Jewish magi.
A third? You exaggerate. Spont magic is the weakest and most inferior form of magic IMHO. Mastered spells are supreme, followed by enchantments, followed by regular formulaics, and sponts come last. Again, just my personal preference. But to sat Diedne invented a third of Hermetic magic is going a bit to far I think.
You are entitled to your opinion, and since this is all fiction, your opinion is fact in your games. But don't speak for all gamers. This gamer thinks that the right thing was done in the Schism War. This gamer thinks that Entessimon's speech was awesome. This gamer thinks that the Tremere and Flambeau did the right thing, they saved the Order and created the prosperous unity they currently enjoy.
It is all fiction, and my opinion is fact in my games as well
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What now? OK: human rights violations...even if we push back the modern concept of human rights to the medieval period which is problematic, there's no way this can stand. The vikings were pagans, and committed genocide in some of the cities they took, and used fear as a weapon to extract cash from their victims, leading to butchery and rape. They also were pro-slavery and practiced marriage by rape.
The Romans were pagans, and they had the Colosseum, which was a vast engine for grinding out sacrifices (including Christians...they really did feed them to the lions). And this was just the biggest of its type: they had one of these in every major city, where they killed people as religious sacrifice for entertainment. Also remembering that the Romans were all in favor of killing people who were unwilling to worship the Emperors. The Wars of the Jews, for example. Who nailed Jesus to a tree? Roman pagans. They were very, very pro-slavery.
The big pagan group in ME is Lithuania. Again, pro-slavery.
IRL: that's because there's very little evidence of the druids doing anything at all, ever. Our records on them are bad, and made worse by a layer of romanticised pap smeared over the top of them.
In game? That's because of a pseduo-policy of not mentioning the war, and you can't prove a negative. There's also no good record that they weren't Satanists. There's no evidence they weren't werekoalas in disguise. There's no evidence that House Tytalus don't worship a huge bronze statue of the line editor's wife. "There's no evidence for X..." has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of "-X".
As to their power-greed, what exactly did the Tremere get out of the war? Where's their profit? Just to be clear here: where exactly is this megalomania you claim they have? The Diedne territories, after the war, were divided predominently between House Flambeau and Tytalus. What new policy did they get through the Order, now that the war was over, other than that Houses needed to allow the Guernicus to inspect them for diabolism? Ir's not like they actually -rule- anything they didn't rule before the war, now is it? There's not proof of expansionism in the House following the Sundering.
Why didn't Diedne allow the House to be investigated, in your view, and how can you have a reasonable system of law based on a powerful group saying "We refuse to ever allow officials of the law to know what we are doing."?
I accept you have the right to whatever religion you like, but I don't feel any particular need to take any other person's profession of faith as some sort of serious argument. I know people who worship cane toads, after all.
The game is making you feel annoyed and defensive? How does that work? In game the druids were killed off over a thousand years later than in real life aqnd some of their techniques were passed down to others, so they got a far nicer run than in the real world.
Also, I note that players who get emotional these fictional pagans are part of the reason no sensible author would write a book of druids. The web is full of neo-druids waiting to say "No this is all wrong..." so the original authors, I presume, wisely chose not to bother and instead chose house focuses like fire, necromancy, zen, and werewolves. Authors get enough stick as it is: given that druids are obviously a steeljawed beartrap of a subject, why even bother trying when there's so much else you could do?
Yes, because in a world with a real Satan, transparency in government is wrong. 8)
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Like feudal Christianity was a paradise of equality ? 
Yet there was much more tolerance for cultural and religious diversity in ancient Rome than under Christianity.
of rebels.
They waged no Inquisition, and no similar way of organized intolerance.
The point (at least as I'm concerned) is not that historical pagans were fluffy-bunny anachronistic democratic pacifists, but that monotheist societies in no way were substantially nicer than pagan societes at the same level of cultural development, yet they added their own brand of organized murderous intolerance.
That's not my point.
If religious sacrifice is but the way to implement capital punishment, there is no difference, outside of trappings.
Such as the way the Bjornaer Founder was ostracized by the real shapeshifters ? But looking at the level of vicious paranoia against harmless shapeshifter magi that the House has birthed, it seems that the oens that kicked her out had a point. That proves nothing, one way or ther other.
Oh, by the way, the Diedne are not the only harmless magical tradition that Tremere and Tytalus massacrated in their bigot power trip, and whose demise made Hermetic magic substantially poorer. Look at the Hyperboreans.
First, it is not proven by any means. Second, it only matters if you buy the Church party line. Many mages would beg to differ.
There's that one bit in the Code, about the right to protect one's magical secrets, that many magi, including the Diedne, take seriously. Even so, I freely admit that the Diedne made a bad mistake by not throwing doors open, and then using lack of evidence to turn the case against the Tremere.
So do the soldiers of any Evil Empire.
Especially since the Code sanctions capital punishment as the default for serious violations.
As long as you don't use a questionable piece of canon to make gamers that prefer the alternative feel like they are a Rom in occupied Europe. Play what you like, but recognize that enforcing anti-Diedne/anti-exotic paranoia is definitely harassing to the other side.
I said one-third of spellcasting: sponting, formulaic, ritual. Spont trades absolute power level for flexiblity, which is a different kind of power.
I don't see why some romanticsm of Druids is bad considering the romanicism of the Church that is in the game.
I don't see how it's ok to say that roman pagans are all evil because of the Colosseum, but then go an and have a rainbows and sunshine view of the Church.
Hope all Jewish Magi are wearing their hat's, would hate to start a war with the Divine 'cause of some non conformist magi is going against papal decree.
If you worship a Daimon... a magic entity, are decended from a greek hero, or any other of the fantastic options available in RoP:Fairie or RoP:Magic, you had best keep it a sercret or you and your children will be burned by a Tremere... They did it once. And you definitly need to keep it from the Church.
Because Christianity is still a modern religion, and some gamers (such as myself) happen to be Christian. There are modern Druids, but they are not the same as ancient Druids. It was reinvented in the 19th century.
I didn't say I thought the medevial church was rainbows or sunshine. If it was, there would be no protestants or catholic reformation.
However, Christianity is indeed responsible for our modern concept of human rights. Christianity put an end to slavery. In the US, Christianity was the driving force behind the abolitionist movement. Christianity brought about sientific achievement. Later there were conflicts, granted. But the modern Catholic church (post Vatican II and John Paul) is very involved in advancements such as astronomy and medicine.
I am not catholic, I just give them their due for improving themselves.
Hmmm, I see the confusion.
Try separating the institution from the faith. There is more than one type of Christianity in the middle ages. The Orthodox are still a major force then and now
And Jews are also Divine. From the Ars Magica perspective, they are the same thing.
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Tytalus and FlambeauĂ´s got one kind of treatment for playing with the infernal, Diedne gets a lot worse treatment for MAYBE doing the same?
Cut the pagans a break? Thats ridiculous, when what youĂ´re seemingly advocating is the absolute opposite.
Why single them out as a whole as the opposite if you want to leave it openended anyway?
Houseruled, i have simply treated the "big" cases of diabolism roughly equally in a longtime perspective, with Diedne getting a bit extra hit because of Tremere enmity and power(giving them the "Discredited Lineage" flaw as standard).
But with the house as such still alive.
But also with the Tremere actions having had some degree of backlash when just as in the other cases the diabolics were a small group only.
So the Diedne are another group considered in risk of becoming diabolics, while the Tremere are seen as suspicious almost whatever they do. Which all totalled just adds up to much more story material.
And im not even specifically a fan of Diedne anyway. I do like to have them "included" or "around" so to speak, but iĂ´ve only played one when another player wasnt around.
Now thats just prejudiced and silly to assume.
From the sourcematerial, sounds like they work perfectly as one PART of it.
And no they dont by the way. It makes things easier for the rulers but its not a requirement.
They often need someone/something that can be vividly divided up into WE and THEM, but this also isnt an absolute requirement.
Well, ill repeat this part again, the facists in comparison to the other houses...
Well if you ever act as SG yourself, you could adopt our version, there the Tremere is fairly small, untrusted and trying to get people to forget the anti-Diedne debacle.
Though still with relatively lots of people in important positions.
Exactly.