So what mercenary archetypes are there to play other than grizzled and old?

>Swiss.
Or if in a modern game, South African.

Married to the war, enjoying the violence.
A honorable warrior who also happens to sell his services (pic related).
Flamboyant and fabulous like a Landsknecht, smugly cussing out his enemies for being both unfashionable and weak.
"I'm collecting money for *something*, and fighting seems like the quickest way to get rich"

A guy loves killing but at the same time he wants to give back to society. So he decides excessive murder is his way to contribute to society and genuinely thinks he's doing good. Being a merc is just him try to make some cash off of it.

>Swiss.
If I'm not mistaken, the French forbade their Swiss mercenaries to sing songs about home because they'd literally get too homesick to fight.

I hate bears, I really do. I hate them because they look so soft and fluffy and I want to cuddle up against them, but they'd tear me apart for doing that. Why haven't we bred a kind, gentle, domesticatable bear yet? I want bears to become the new dogs.

>I hate bears, I really do. I hate them because they look so soft and fluffy and I want to cuddle up against them, but they'd tear me apart for doing that. Why haven't we bred a kind, gentle, domesticatable bear yet? I want bears to become the new dogs.
The problem with bears ain't they're all crazy killers, it's they're unpredictable as shit and stupid as stumps. You can raise a bear from infancy and live with it for ten years and it'd be the fluffiest, loveliest pet ever then one day at random it just gets a case of stupid and bites your head off.

>So what mercenary archetypes are there to play other than grizzled and old?

Landschneckt

>I want bears to become the new dogs.
>not wanting to be a bear

Just think of the possibilities! You can rant on /k/ and /out/ about how harmless bears are and that you only need to take bear spray instead of .45-70 on your next camping trip.

...

Me and one of my friends had a joke that if we couldnt find work by the time we turned 30 we'd become mercanaries africa. So you could do that, some commoner who signs up later in life for lack of other options. Very little to no intial combat experience. Not overly ambitious, or honorable, or evil. Just a dude trying to scrape by, in way over his head.

Considering that the Swiss were the most prominent mercenary force in Europe for a good long while, that statement reads more like the French wanted them to stop singing for nationalistic reasons, while the stated reason of homesickness was for propaganda reasons.

Remember, French-Swiss is mostly understandable to a French speaker, and the living conditions there were a fair lot better than for a peasant in France. Also remember that the reason mercenaries ended up with a bad name is because national leaders realized they couldn't have condottiere and co. stealing their nation's youth away when those youths were needed in the state army, come the arms race of centralized national armies.