PF - Where In Golarion Do Clockworks Come From?

[unseenmage]

More specifically, where in that world would an entire clockwork seafaring ship come from? I'm thinking accidental pirates. They're programed to recover a specific minting of coin and by the time they find where it's been disseminated the coin has been mixed with local currencies. So now the clockworks are collecting the coins, and anything else that they happen to be stored with!

This is all fine and good except I have little to no clue what government or faction or personage in Golarion could/would send out such an automated recovery expedition.

[zimmerwald1915]

More specifically, where in that world would an entire clockwork seafaring ship come from? I'm thinking accidental pirates. They're programed to recover a specific minting of coin and by the time they find where it's been disseminated the coin has been mixed with local currencies. So now the clockworks are collecting the coins, and anything else that they happen to be stored with!

This is all fine and good except I have little to no clue what government or faction or personage in Golarion could/would send out such an automated recovery expedition.
First King Xin was fond of clockworks.

[Sayt]

Numerian wizards have been known to cobble a few together as well.

[Serafina]

There's an entire goddess, Brigh (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Brigh), who is heavily into clockwork constructs. She's True Neutral, so she can fit pretty much every other goal in terms of alignment. She's concerned with invention in general too - so it's really easy to just have someone get a bit of divine inspiration, or be a worshipper in relative isolation, and have them build this thing.

If you need an explanation for your players of "where did this come from", you can just have the information be engraved on the ship itself, in the form of divine symbols and the like.

The real question here isn't "who could build such a thing", but for the purpose of plot it's much more important to ask "why are they gathering the coin".

[Coidzor]

The real question here isn't "who could build such a thing", but for the purpose of plot it's much more important to ask "why are they gathering the coin".

And why are they using such a heavy-handed, brainless way of going about it with no oversight from an intelligent creature?

[unseenmage]

...

The real question here isn't "who could build such a thing", but for the purpose of plot it's much more important to ask "why are they gathering the coin".

And why are they using such a heavy-handed, brainless way of going about it with no oversight from an intelligent creature?

Yeah that's the easy part. Intelligent oversight would obviously have been part of the original design/crew but was impaired or destroyed at some point in the journey.

As to the why... that's the fun part. What about these seemingly ordinary coins would merit such overreaction? Will be fun to find out.

For me the hard part is the Golarion lore.

[Fenryr]

The technology for creating clockwork constructs was developed long ago in Azlant, then perfected in Thassilon.

Inner Sea World Guide, page 256.

[unseenmage]

Inner Sea World Guide, page 256.

Thank you.

Now, should these things be ancient or really ancient? Getting them to the sea from Alkenstar seems like it'd need a lot of extra exposition.

Ancient magic-ed Azlanti coin plundered from a ruin would seem a likely culprit. Clockworks acting on ancient orders sans their original masters seems likely too.

Could even tie the release of the magic-ed coin to an ancient Azlant enemy even.