Each coil should have a wire(green/yellow), that will be +12v power from the kill switch.
Each coil should have a ground wire(brown) for the secondary(spark side), high voltage circuit.
Coil #1 will have 2 black/blue wires. One will be from the ignition module, the other goes to the inst cluster for the tach.
Coil #2 will have a black/red, and coil #3 will have black/green, both of those then also go to the ignition module.
The low voltage circuit of the coils(including timing advance) is all controlled by the ignition module.
If the brown wire from the coils is broken, you should have no spark, or very weak spark at the plugs. This would have no effect on spark timing specifically. If the harness wiring is bad or questionable, I'd connect the coil brown wire direct to the engine block.