I've been wrapping up Exiled, the weekly actual play I've been running, that was mostly FASERIP and part of the end has been a series of 12 one shot RPGs featuring alternate universe characters.
Some characters are just origin swaps of other characters so I wanted a way to delineate the differences and to let them understand their characters, so I cribbed the Backgrounds from 13th Age.
You will get 8 background points to help with your character on rolls, allowing them to get column shifts making it easier to succeed on rolls that they should be able to do. Backgrounds are things that your character has done in the past, usually best viewed as major periods of time in their life.
For example if you played Wonder Woman, Supreme Court Justice -
3 - Raised on Themyscara - reflecting your time growing up and learning to fight could help for things like knowing Grecco-Roman mythology or wrestling
3 - Raised the Bar - reflecting your time in law school could help for legal proceedings, knowing the law, and finding law contacts
2 - On The Bench - could reflect your contacts and power in the US Government, ability to wield hammers and your ability to always have an interesting conversation starter.
You have 8 points to split with a max of 4 in any single rank so you could try 3/3/2, 4/2/2, 3/4/1, etc depending on what you think is most important. In the game you'll be able to call on these backgrounds in rolls. You reference one background max, and you get column shifts up to the max rank value.
It helps save room on character sheets, lets you boil down characters to what the player thinks is important, gets around the 20+ versions of Martial Arts and so on.