Skills are per-Adventure and entirely yours to define. Everything in the Garden — node colours, help request tags, endorsements, Mission rewards — runs off this catalogue, so it's worth setting up deliberately before players arrive.
You'll find it on the Manage Skills tab of your Adventure.
What Each Skill Carries
- Name — what players see. Use their language, not internal jargon.
- Description — a short explanation of what the Skill actually means. This surfaces as a tooltip on skill chips in the Garden, so it's genuinely read by players, not just admin reference.
- Colour — drives the node colour of every player whose master skill this is. Pick visibly distinct colours; this is what makes clusters legible.
- Icon — the visual shorthand.
- Max level — the ceiling. A broad competency might use 40; a binary capability gate uses 1.
- Endorsable — whether players can award Blooms in this Skill to each other. Turn this off for gate Skills you want earned only through the Journey.
Designing a Good Catalogue
Write real descriptions. A Skill called "Resilience" with no explanation means whatever each player assumes. A sentence of definition makes endorsements consistent across your whole roster.
Keep it to competencies people can recognise in each other. If a player can't tell whether a colleague demonstrated it, they won't endorse it, and the Skill stays dead.
Use the endorsable flag properly. Broad competencies should be endorsable — that's the Garden working. Gate Skills like "Mentor", which unlock capabilities, should not be, or players can hand each other the keys.
Give distinct colours. Twelve Skills in twelve shades of blue produces a Garden nobody can read.
Renaming Rather Than Deleting
If you're reworking a catalogue that's already in use, rename existing Skills instead of deleting and recreating them. Every Bloom ever awarded is tied to the Skill it was granted in — rename it and that history follows into the new name; delete it and you orphan real recognition players earned.
Wiring Skills Into the Journey
Milestones and achievements can both award Skills on completion — set the Skill reward when authoring them, alongside the existing XP, item, and achievement rewards. This is what connects individual progression to relational progression, and it's worth doing for your milestone content at minimum. See Designing Milestones.