Histories: Character Bio As Skill System

Spellbound Kingdoms by Frank Brunner has probably influenced my thinking on game design more than any other non-OSR game.  Yes, more than Shadowrun.  And the kicker is, I haven't even played it yet. 

It's a glorious mish-mash of brilliant ideas, good ideas poorly implemented, and just plain weird ideas.  In my opinion, the single best idea in the whole game is the Histories mechanic– a combination of character bio and skill system. 

A history is a phrase stating something your character did in the past, such as "Piloted a walking ballista in the Opana campaign."  This is both a true statement– hence, a character bio– and a skill.  

What does it make you skilled at?  Whatever would be clearly implied by the fact that you did that thing. In this case, you'd know about the Opanna region and the history of that war, military life and organization, and the operation and maintenance of walkers and ballistae.  

Histories start out at the minimum rating, which is four in Spellbound Kingdoms since it uses a step die mechanic, but would be one in most systems you'd transplant this to.  After that they advance based on your preferred method of advancement, so they could all be equal to your level, or get skill points invested in them individually, or level up with use.  

Like a lot of things in Spellbound Kingdoms, Brunner came up with a brilliant idea but didn't quite go the last mile to make it work as well as it could.  

How to Write a Good History

The rulebook provides no real guidelines for writing histories.  The examples in the book are pretty good, however the ones that Frank Brunner's players have come up with in his playtest campaign seem to be all over the place.  Like, some are run-on sentences (or the actual history followed by notes on it, it's hard to tell), some are really short, and some are just statements of what a character is good out without saying anything about their history. 

That's easy enough to fix with a few simple rules and format guidelines.

First off, no run-on sentences.  More concretely, no more than one comma (unless you're listing a few things like "my friends John, Alan, Marsha and Ted"), and nothing that tries to cheat this rule because it clearly should have more than one comma.  If you start to get short of breath reading it out loud, it's a run-on sentence.  

Second– needs to be a statement about what you did, not what you're good at.  It's implied that you're good at whatever the history says you did.  "stole a car" is a good start.  "good at stealing cars" is missing the point.  

Third– if you mention people, places or organizations, get specific about them.  One of the examples in the book is "studied religion in a mountain temple."  That's almost there– but "studied Buddhism in a mountain temple in Vietnam" is so much better.  

Fourth, aside from mentioning what you did, every history should mention one or two people, places, organizations or institutions.  This grounds your histories in the setting.  

Now, as for formulae for good histories, I've come up with three.  There are more than three good ones of course but this is a start.  I wouldn't make it an actual rule that you have to follow one of these formulas and some of Brunner's example histories don't follow them but are nonetheless good, so think of these more as something to use if you're having trouble coming up with ideas.  

Did X, then Y, also involving person or place Z.

Stole a car and drove it across the Great Desert of Almaz

Enlisted as an archer in the Criztan Army, then deserted after witnessing war crimes

Grew up in the slums of Lankhmar, then became a cat burglar  

Accomplished X by doing Y, involving person or place Z

Snuck into Aldarlan Castle disguised as a servant and assassinated the king's chamberlain

Blasted the Arch-Bandit to smithereens using a ray gun recovered from an ancient ruin

Saved Chieftan Erickson's daughter from a plague using knowledge recovered from a pre-collapse medical textbook

Did cool thing that put me at the intersection of X and Y, involving location or organization Z

Worked as a sketch artist for the LAPD

Was a dancer at The Grinning Maiden, a bar in Shaketown frequented by smugglers and gangsters

Translator for the orc warlord Gorsh One-Eye

What Histories are Used For

Up to you, but personally I plan to use them for pretty much everything other than saves.  Histories can serve a lot of purposes, including:

Skill system.  This is their core function.  This includes both active skills, i.e. stuff your character can do, and knowledges.

Character bio– meaning both of stuff that happened before character creation, and essentially a campaign record that's kept on your character sheet.  This is more than just interesting; it gives both player and referee things that can be used in play.  If you used to be a bandit, you might get in trouble with the law because of that.  Whatever your histories say, really happened, and anything implied by that is fair game.  

Building on that, histories can serve as a contacts system.  If you want to find just general contacts, like find a doctor or score some weed, that's a simple charisma check.  Histories allow you to find more specialized contacts.  If you were a sketch artist for the LAPD, you can make a history plus charisma roll to find artist or police contacts in the Los Angeles area.  

Language system.  Some histories can convey knowledge of languages.  I wouldn't use this as your sole language system if you want languages to be important.  I'd maybe use it on top of the system for Lamentations of the Flame Princess for finding out if your character already knows a language.  

How Characters Get Histories

If classes inherently make people skilled at stuff the class is supposed to be good at, PC's start with one history.  If classes only give special abilities but like, fighters are only good with swords if they actually take a sword skill, then everyone starts with two histories but one should relate to their class.  

Especially long-lived races like elves get an extra starting history to represent being old to begin with.  

Beyond that, you get a new history if you do something awesome enough to warrant one.  One new history per level is a good guideline, but I don't think you necessarily need to make it a rule.  

If all histories are rated equal to level, then maybe make it a rule.  If histories level up individually the issue is sort of self-balancing, since having more histories tends to mean they each rank up more slowly.  

One absolute rule though: never award the same history to two characters.  If they accomplish something awesome together, give them different histories referencing their individual contributions.  

Example: two characters kill a warlord in a totally sweet post-apocalyptic car chase, possibly involving gratuitous heavy metal guitars.

Character 1: Out-drove The Dunelord Karn–El in a buggy I rebuilt myself

Character 2: Shot The Dunelord Karn-El from the back of a wildly swerving buggy

I was about to publish this when it finally hit me that the guitar guy might not really be gratuitous.  If the warboys don't all have radios, maybe the heavy metal wagon is just the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a drum and fife squad coordinating the army.  I dunno, maybe.  Maybe it's just to psych the warboys up.  Then again, maybe Joe just likes to be really stylish when he fights.  

As for advancing histories once you have them, I like this mechanic.