I understand Arthur's motivations and conflicting desires, and Gawaine's, Lancelots, Guenevere's , Mordred's etc but for the sake of running the GPC what is the motivation of:

Merlin: he wants to support Arthur ( a Christian king) - why? ( i mean if he wanted him to be pagan why deliver him to Sir Ector) What is his plan? Does he hope the success of Arthurs Britain will continue, and ultimately he is just wrong? Is it that Britain just can't stay strong enough long enough to actually defeat the Saxon invasion? - or is the whole Arthur thing just a sideline for Merlin ? Is he off somewhere else ( in faerie once it comes back ) doing stuff he really cares about?

Morgan: she hates Arthur for his conception & father. Is that it? ( I mean such hatred could be enough)

Nineve: she seems to be working against Merlin & uther. What is her plan ?

The other ladies of the lake - in fact most magically gifted people seem to be "pulling the strings " where as most more mundane people are just trying to get by, so what are the enchanter types trying to achieve. What is their master plans?

All IMG, your Pendragon will vary etc etc

Merlin - serves the realm in the widest sense of the word. For a while that meant serving Uther, but Uther was a means to an end and Merlin was perfectly willing to break with him and go for a better candidate once Arthur came onto the scene. Arthur is a means to an end too, except that Merlin takes care to supervise Arthur's upbringing so he never has to break with him. Many find themselves at cross-purposes with Merlin at one time or another - this is because they have a narrower or more sectional view of what 'The Realm' means than Merlin.

Morgan - the realms of the 'three queens' (her and her two sisters) were on the losing side in the early part of Arthur's reunification wars and she carries an epic grudge. Having said that, she doesn't hate Arthur - it's entirely a 'this is business, not personal' in terms of her attitude to the High King. She *does* hate Guinevere however (who publicly upbraided her for keeping a paramour and banished her from court for a while in the mid teens) and she has a lust denied/hate thing going on with Lancelot - it is those passions which drive a lot of her anti-RT shenanigans, rather than hatred of the King.

Nineve - is working for a pagan revival agenda during the Anarchy. Rather than going for Merlin's loner "shoot the moon" strategy of trying to create an ideal warrior/philosopher king, she is building a network of magicians answerable to her and sponsoring lots of smaller scale candidates for a dose of mystical mojo as prep for the holy war she is planning that will drive the Saxons and the Christians out of Britain. Sir Hervis gets a bunch of mystical help for his marshland raiders war against the Anglish for instance, but she isn't too fussy about where she sources her mojo from which makes her a prime target for diabolical manipulation - so Gorboduc is one of hers also. A bunch of the robber knights and evil witch/wizard adventures in the early part of Arthur's reign are the remnants of her network cut loose to pursue their own agendas after she gets killed by Balin.

The rest of the Ladies of the Lake are *much* less radical than Nineve and spend a lot of the time dealing with the fallout from the Merlin/Nineve clash. Merlin managed to pull off his long-shot, so they work to bolster that achievement and put down the worst examples of Nineve's toxic waste. Once Arthur is securely on the throne they worry that Merlin will become a crutch for the new King and thus prevent Arthur from growing fully into his power - hence the Nimue / Crystal Cave plan.

Regards
Luke

I tend to find that when I come to a thread after Luke has answered it, I am left with little to say.

Except: Great ideas, I am stealing them for my campaign, too. :)

Wow. These are nuggets of gold for me too :)

We've had a bit of intrigue with Morgan in my game. One of the retired knights will resurface later on on her side. I've not had Nineve appear yet and those nuggets are pure gold Luke.

We're running 506 in a couple of weeks so it could be time to reveal her.

Thanks guys. My game runs pretty slowly, so I have a lot of time to think about motivations and what might be going on behind the facade of the 'public record' (which is how I view much of what the GPC tells us).

Other examples from my game:

Ygraine colluded with Merlin to hide her son away because she feared for his safety if Uther discovered that he was Gorlois' posthumous heir (after all they *saw* Gorlois come to Tintagel on that fateful night). She might even be correct on Gorlois being the father - I haven't decided exactly what went down between Merlin, Uther, Igraine and Gorlois on that night, other than that there was some major mystical juice flying about.

Speaking of how Merlin did the whole Arthur begetting thing, my tip top favourite bit of secret history I've come up with is based on the coincidence of timing between events at Tintagel and the destruction of Pevensey by Aelle. There's a bit in Saxons! which says that Aelle dedicates the town as a sacrifice to Wotan ahead of the escalade - this gives the saxons major magical power ups for the assault but everything has to be destroyed and all the inhabitants killed or the magic rebounds upon the practitioners as a curse. IMG Merlin arranged for someone to escape from the sack precisely so that he could tap that curse to provide extra juice for his Cornish project. Arthur is partly the product of that curse's mystical energy and so from one perspective his victory at Mt. Badon can be seen as the eventual working out of that curse.

The ambush of Morgan Le Fay that goes so horribly wrong for the saxon ambushers? That was Duke Ulfius' work. He had been planning on using Morgan for a marriage alliance with the Centurion King so when Igraine and Morgan slipped his leash and bolted for Lothian, he send some of his foederate troops to intercept them on the road and bring them back.

The Netley Marsh campaign was when King Mark produced Prince Eliwlod and claimed that he was Uther's hidden heir (he's actually Madoc's byblow rather than Uther's, but that was close enough for Mark's purpose). Mark tried to get Natanleod to come on board with the proposal and form a triumvirate with Cerdic to boost Eliwlod to the throne of Logres and eventually the High Kingship of Britain. When that fell through, he did a 'Lord Stanley at Bosworth Field' stab in the back in order to clear the board of a blocking faction.

Prince Eliwlod was another one of Nineve's projects. She reckoned on the blood line being close enough that she could co-opt the Sword in the Stone to back up her protege. Merlin took a dim view of this and Eliwlod suffered an unfortunate accident the first time Merlin could engineer a break in the mystical protections that Nineve's people had put in place about him (this hasn't happened yet IMG, but I'm thinking of nicking the White Ship disaster for Eliwlod's death).

Regards
Luke

Just focussing on Merlin. I understand that he has his "Arthur" project. But what does he hope to achieve for Britain ?

Is it an ousting of the Saxons?
Is it a revival of the pagan religion? ( unlikely as Arthur and uther are Christian - even if soft line Christian)

He foresees Arthur's birth but not Guenevere's inability to produce an heir?
Does he not forsee the Lancelot/Guenevere issues ?
His attempt on Mordred's life as a baby seems very haphazard - I mean he knows who the mother is, can't he just deal with her child - properly ( though I understand he prefers not to kill himself and once he has seen the ship sink beneath the waves Mordred's subsequent survival seems ok.

He must understand at that time, that for a kingdom to survive it needs an heir. I mean that is pendragon 101. So:

Why doesn't he take steps to ensure Arthur has a bunch of legitimate heirs ( or does he?)
Why doesn't he take steps to ensure he(merlin) has an heir/apprentice ( or does he?)

Well, IMO, Arthur is Merlin goal... a king dedicated to such concepts as Justice, Chivalry and Honor. Merlin's goal, then, is a realm ruled by justice, where the strong protect the weak and honor is the guiding light.

Arthur is the paragon, the ideal against whom all other kings shall be measured. Ensuring the survival of Arthur's line is perhaps less important than ensuring the survival of the ideals which Arthur represents. In this he succeeds...

Camelot's existence, even for only one shining moment, is the triumph of Merlin's schemes. Camelot's fall, while tragic, is inevitable. All things must die but that Camelot stood, that the Knights of the Round table existed and would be remembered ever after, is a triumph beyond measure.

Merlin did not ensure an heir to Arthur's body. Instead he ensured countless heir's to Arthur's legacy.