Question for the class:
What motivates a 100,000 year-old sentient AI/Human hybrid with the past memories of their predecessors, whose entire culture was destroyed in an apocalyptic war of mutual annihilation millennia ago and who has steadily been losing both the ability to control what remains of its city, and its sanity, and who is destined to be destroyed by its own planet in the near future?
My default assumption has just been that it wants to be left alone to die. It hates all the Rogue Traders and such pillaging its superior technology, "devolved" humans and others looting the corpse of its once mighty culture. It resents intrusion, especially by those in considers inferior, and it basically has no plan for the future because it doesn't have one.
My biggest consideration is that something like this Archeotech AI/Human hybrid can't really survive for long in the 40k universe. It'd be too disruptive, spawns too many plot threads of import for this small side-venture I'd arranged.
So I've constructed things such that it can go away very quickly if need be (basically it collapses into the molten core of its geologically unstable planet, which is being burnt to a cinder by the solar system's overactive sun.) Likewise, I don't have many compunctions about it initiating its own destruction just to thwart the PCs. I have all that arranged and I'm satisfied more or less with it. (In truth I think I overreached when I set up the entire adventure. The scope is too broad and too game changing tbh.)
Anyways, my problem is this: what kind of motivation do you give to such a being in such a circumstance? I've given the being a way to communicate different thoughts and opinions (consider it like a mild form of schizophrenia combined with
something like this) but when it comes down to it I find it doesn't have much to say other than "You're not welcome here" and "If you don't go away I'll destroy you." (Almost forced two PCs to burn fate points tonight hehe.)
Again, while part of it might want to be saved or to pass on its knowledge to someone, anyone, and that's totally believable....it would cause a lot of turbulence in the game I think were it to happen. An entire Archeotech culture's complete history in the hands of PCs? Half or even a third of a city worth of preserved artifacts? Yeah, it could spawn some cute "Mechanicus/Inqusition/Aliens/Everyone is up your butt now" adventures but that'd completely derail what the campaign had been about so far. And it's just too much power and profit factor to lay on the party right now.
So in lieu of "help me/take my knowledge", what's a reasonable motivation for this being to have that's more than just a bog standard "fuck you die" with a dash of "you're so inferior." It's the perfect rationale for it wanting to protect its culture's technology (which essentially lead its own people to wage a war of extinction), but it doesn't add much character to it. I'll roll ahead with what I have if no better ideas turn up (the PCs will meet this thing next week) but I'm hoping to come up with a belief or motivation that isn't simply just waiting to die (which describes at least one NPC already in the game.)
Cause if they end up rescuing this thing or at least preserving the vast majority of what still remains....I may have to pull some shenanigans to keep things balanced.