Best Left Buried: Mentality Archetypes:

Best Left Buried has the potential to be a pretty nasty game system, at least from a mechanical perspective. A single lucky hit from anything could outright kill a player character, even (by technicality) a bite from a rat. Your characters - intrepid Cryptdiggers - will emerge from their tombs of plunder broken, battered and traumatised. If they don't carry debilitating Injuries then they'll certainly bear mental Afflictions, disgusting Corruptions or virulent and bizarre Diseases. Characters tend to die, quite a lot.

As such, I've found a lot of things to like in Best Left Buried's method of character creation. It's quick and easy, simple enough to complete yet flexible enough to give your characters some flavour and flair. A major caveat of this character creation process is in determining an Archetype your character bears - effectively their occupation or 'class', which gives a few abilities for flavour and can be useful in determining backstory and personality.

There are 12 Archetypes in the Cryptdigger's guide to survival. They're all really good, I think, very unique and discernable from one another. They all have a lot of character to them, and this can be interpreted by the player in a load of different ways to make a cryptdigger stand out from the rest, and make their story particularly interesting (or tragic).

Mentality Archetypes:

One of my first big projects I did with the Best Left Buried system was that of writing more Archetypes. I wrote around 16 of them and put them all into a pdf - honestly, it's probably way too many but I enjoyed writing them and have even more written down in notes.
They were mainly focused on examining how different cryptdiggers respond to the trauma their job is exposing them to; a handful of them aren't really focused on specific occupational roles, more so on how they are coping with the horrors. 

Others are the opposite, focusing more on precise job roles and occupations that the cryptdiggers might have once been in their lives. There are the Woodsmen, traumatised lumberjacks from Ilym, the blinded Coenobite Monks and noble Scions, to name a few.

The Coenobite is probably my favourite. Blinded monks who defile gods, who can't see due to some past occurrence. They might have had their eyes torn out, had some kind of curse put upon them or might just wear a blindfold or helmet. 

One of my characters was a Norui Monk who had his metal mask melted into his skin due to an arcane mishap. He died in Islesmere and it made me a bit sad.

Though this project is complete, I have ideas for how I can update it. Somewhat embarrassingly, i exported the pdf from GIMP and as such you can't highlight any text or search for any words. I'm definitely gonna have to rewrite it in a more useable form.

There also isn't a lot of art in it, and I feel that the art I have included isn't particularly evocative in the way of showing what might be possible using these character options. If I rework it then I'll definitely add more and work on trying to make the designs more visually descriptive.

I've also got some ideas for as to how I can make these archetypes more usable in a game setting. It's something I'll have to work on, but an idea I have is how I might add random tables to generate details and background elements for the character. I have some notes for how this might work using the Coenobite archetype:

D6 COENOBITE FACTIONS:

• Interer Coenobite [Norui, those who worship Vaashni. Use masks to hide faces in necromancy, embalming and battle.]
  
• The Gouged Order [Torre, those who ritualistically remove or cover their eyes to stave off intruding nightmares]
• Peer of the Ordo Silencia [Maigne, Cult of Chalice members who perpetually wear a sealed helm. Trained to spar blind.]
• Follower of the Orc-Iron Way [Jerrod, humans who delve into Rytik with Orcish folk. Need to cover their eyes so not affected by Iron Hall monsters.]
• Mourner of the Pale Wrappings [Keene, person who covers themselves in white linen in memory of a white wizard saint]
• Sunajin Huntress [Salver, person who lost their own face to hunt face-takers]
  

(these also include notes on the appropriate Duchies a character of this faction might hail from. I'll work on fleshing these out more when I get around to reworking this project)

D6 CAUSES OF BLINDNESS

• Eyes were torn from head
• Fae replaced eyes with useless gold
• Use of the arcane melted a mask to your flesh
• A holy helmet is bolted into your skin
• Void magic has made your eyes and forehead a dark pit
• Used eyes in an alchemical ritual to restore a limb

D6 UNCOMMON RITUALS

• Sleeping ritual, burning incense and meditation
• Food ritual, the utter engorgement of the body between periods of fasting
• Orgy ritual, give up sexual pleasure for magical prowess
• Creation ritual, create elaborate paintings before destroying them with acid
• Arcane ritual, spend days in reverence of dark and forgotten powers
• Bloodletting Ritual, spill the blood of others to saturate your vision with suffering

D6 RELICS OF REVERENCE

• Your mask is engraved with blasphemous runes
• A scarf that has verses of your appropriate practices [Ritual+Faction] Written atop it
• Ritual knife that was to be used on you
• A sealed reliquary containing an unknown treasure
• Scriptures engraved with words hot to the touch, untranslated
• Your own eyes, mummified and pickled into an anatomical antique