Why Backgrounds

The Background of Backgrounds

Feng Shui 2nd Edition (I don't know if the same applies to Feng Shui 1st ed) has this brilliant point that your skills don't just represent what you can do. They represent your area of knowledge, your contacts, and the whole range of your character's experience and knowledge.

For example, if have some sort of sword fighting as a skill (sorry, I don't remember the exact skill names), you'll know how to fight with swords, how to identify swords, you'll be familiar with prominent and historical sword masters, and you'll know the people that trained you or trained with you.

The resistance system (Spire: The City Must Fall & Heart: The City Beneath) has something a bit similar. In a way it is more general, but it is more nuanced in how it provides your bonus..

In this system, you have Domains. When a person, place, or thing is related to one of your Domains, you add a die to your pool. For example, if I have the Domain Academia, then I'd get bonus dice for anything within an academic setting (such as sword fighting in a library), dealing with academics (such as sword fighting against a librarian), or using academic McGuffins (such completing research with a set of encyclopedias).

The idea I get from the Domains is that the Scene sets the characters' bonuses. This means that if you want a chance for the Academic character to shine, lead the party to a university campus. If you want an Order character to shine, orchestrate a run-in with the authorities. 

Using These Ideas

I think by mushing these two ideas together, I came up with my background system. 

Basically, they work like domains, but are more general-- Almost like a class concept. Spire has around 10 Domains. In CAET I have 4 Backgrounds (thematically renamed as Kernels). These are the core programming for your PC.

There are 4 Kernels, each created, distributed, and maintained by a separate faction within the setting.

One is basically a Scholar archetype. They gain a bonus for working with people, places, things, related to knowledge. In this post cyber-pocalypse setting this includes data centers, dealing with ciphers, and cryptography. This gives the academic some thief type skills (cracking security codes) and gives the PC a character drive (obtain, preserve and disseminate knowledge).

Each Background then gives a Primary Skill that leads the character into a certain niche.

Hacking for Yourself

For a vanilla fantasy setting, you could declare the background is the class. The Thief will know how to deal with bandits, thieves, possibly assassins, etc. They get bonuses when doing thief activities, and in more criminal-centric parts of town.