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So, what motivates these guys?

The other eight traitor legions have defined motivations, or at the very least, no background that would actively prevent a member from having a reason to do the things they do.

The Night Lords though, are fatalistic, hate the other chaos legions, have no love for the gods, and an intense fatalism.

Pre-Heresy? They were still brutal and fatalistic, but were pursuing their own idea of justice and "setting an example" through their atrocities.

During the Heresy? Still coherent, and they would have stood to have been able to push their pre-heresy agenda on a wider scale had they won.

But after? They just seem to arbitrarily travel around killing things in horrible ways for no larger purpose and not even enjoying it. As written, it looks like a Night Lord would eventually run out of the momentum that was the only thing keeping them going and fall into near-catatonia.

Heck, even Curze appears to have just kind of given up when he let that assassin kill him.

I believe its mainly due to the fact that the legion was made up of murderes and rapist and such during the heresy and continued the practised after the heresy as well

 Scorpionov wrote:
I believe its mainly due to the fact that the legion was made up of murderes and rapist and such during the heresy and continued the practised after the heresy as well

Simple psychopaths with a thin veneer of whatever justification of the moment would certainly make more sense.

I read one of those ADB Night Lord novels some time last year, and there wasn't any mention of that though.

The impression I got from it was that the main Night Lord character in the book frankly didn't have any clearly defined reason to get out of bed in the morning, let alone orchestrate an endless campaign of terror.

keep in mind that this is older fluff it my or may not have changed

The Night Lords are split between two factions- simply killing for the sake of killing, and trying to win the Long War.

Evil for evil's sake.

The Night Lords do what they do because they can. They were basically a crueler version of Batman during the Great Crusade. They used Terror to force people into compliance. And now? Now they do what they do because they can, and because it's what they know. That's my opinion at least.

 Wyzilla wrote:
The Night Lords are split between two factions- simply killing for the sake of killing, and trying to win the Long War.

There are actually even more factions (and actually, that could be said about most traitor legions). There are some who "did not get" why C.K. let himself get killed (to lecture his dad) and they seek revenge. There are some who are just deranged and very close to chaos or have stepped over the line, deluding themselves to still have a free will or power outside of what the gods give them. Some fight the war against the False Emperor, some just keep on doing on what they know because the alternative (suicide) would be unthinkable to Astartes. I think the Soul Hunter novels manage to show those different motivations (way too superficially but still...).

Good answers here. I'd like to add that I think I've read somewhere that they also engage in piracy and the like, much like Huron Blackheart's warband. So perhaps greed could be added in here? In any case, I'll agree with the above: punishing the Imperium and the False Emperor.

Codex pretty much states they live for the accumulation of material wealth/power and love of murdering the defenceless.