Once your Skills catalogue exists, the Garden largely runs itself — players endorse, gift, ask for help, and answer each other. This page covers the levers you hold.
Tasks or Missions?
The two mechanics are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one is the most common way a Garden goes flat:
- Author a Task when you want a player to improve themselves — build a habit, practise something, show up, do the work. Tasks pay XP, BLOO, and Blooms into a Skill.
- Author a Mission when you want a player to improve their Garden — reach out, connect, help somebody. Missions pay Blooms.
Helping themselves is a Task; helping others is a Mission. If you find yourself writing a Mission that a player could complete alone, it should have been a Task.
Authoring Garden Missions
A Mission is a relational goal with a target count and a time window, paid in Blooms and optionally into a specific Skill. Progress evaluates against players' real interaction history automatically, so you're not marking anything off by hand.
The three kinds worth writing
- Help given — "help 5 players who need Leadership help." The strongest Mission type, because the demand is real: it points players at help requests other players actually posted.
- Connections created — "bring ten new people into your network." Use this to break open a cohort that's only talking to people it already knows.
- Reconnection — "improve 5 connections." Pairs with the withering; only worth running once there's genuine drift to correct, which usually means a few weeks in.
Do not author endorsement or gifting Missions
The builder currently offers "Endorse someone" as an auto-tracked rule. Don't use it. Endorsing and gifting should happen because a player means it, not because a Mission is paying them to — and gift Blooms are a limited personal balance, so a Mission that spends them turns a gesture into a transaction. This is a deliberate product decision, not a limitation: gifting isn't offered as a rule type for exactly the same reason.
A practical starting set
One low-target help-given Mission to teach the mechanic and seed the Help board, one connections Mission once the cohort has settled, and one reconnection Mission a few weeks in. Missions that ask for more social effort than your cohort's size supports will just sit there uncompleted.
Gift Bloom Balances
Every player starts with 20 giftable Blooms per Adventure, created automatically the first time they open their Garden — there's no roster setup step.
From a player's drawer you can reset or top up their balance to any amount. This is currently the only way gift Blooms are replenished — there's no automatic refill rule yet, by design, because the right rule hasn't been settled. If you're running a long Adventure, plan on a periodic manual top-up, or brief players that their 20 are meant to last.
Granting Skills Directly
You can award Skill points to any player directly from their drawer. Use this for things the system genuinely can't observe — excellent work in a workshop, leadership during a live event, contributions that happened off-platform.
Direct grants are recorded with you as the source, exactly like any other grant, so the audit trail stays honest.
What To Watch
- A grey Garden means people aren't interacting at all — usually a sign the Adventure needs a reason for them to, not that the Garden is broken.
- One colour dominating means your catalogue is too narrow, or one Skill is far easier to earn than the rest.
- An empty Help board usually means nobody's been shown it. Seed it with a Mission.
- Endorsements clustering inside guilds is normal early on. Connection and re-engagement Missions are the tool for breaking cliques open.