Cultivate Flagrantly

September 12, 2021

This is post is the statement for the Flagrant Garden’s declaration, also found here.

Cultivate Flagrantly #

Make Kitbashable Shit #

Make small components and kits meant to be tossed together, hacked apart, reconfigured, and otherwise iterated on by yourself and anyone who isn’t a shitbird. Default where possible to permissive licensing and actively encourage people to reuse, repurpose, and otherwise remix the knobs, levers, subsystems, and other components in the ecosystem.

Release (Mechanisms) As Early As Possible #

Don’t wait until some new subsystem or alternate rule or remix is fully baked, tested, and perfected before you share it out. Slam your ideas into a plaintext doc, web page, or basic PDF and throw that shit up with the tags right away. Nothing has to be connected or thematically sound or even something you plan to use in a game—if an idea comes to you, get it out there asap. What doesn’t exist can’t be kitbashed or iterated on or inspire anyone.

Iterate and Accelerate Collaboration #

If you see some cool shit, hype it up. Talk about it. Throw out examples of how you’d use it. If you have an idea for an alternate take or slight tweak or whatever, get it out of your head and into the world. Encourage people doing iterative and remix work as much as net-new work. Pair and party up with folks for small projects, run jams, write content for each other’s work. Foster an attitude of collaboration and iteration instead of always building from scratch in an ivory tower.

Build Out, Not Up #

Developing small pieces of rules and mods and subsystems and publishing them early and often and releasing them with permissible licensing means more people can adopt, mod, and build more cool shit more quickly. The point isn’t to build One Perfect System and align behind it, it’s to plant a thousand gardens and loose a thousand gardeners to cultivate cool shit.

Fuck Hierarchies #

Be suspicious of anyone claiming to own these ideas and practices or make themselves synonymous with this or any others. Build infrastructure to help the community grow and change and publish cool shit. Provide mutual aid wherever possible - with cash, support, words, labor, whatever you’ve got. When you find fortresses in the scene, breach them and break the fucking gates. Seek to empower and raise the folks around you, make their names bigger than yours. If you find a bigoted or fascist or abusive motherfucker, push them out of the spaces you occupy and repudiate their shit. Include people early and equitably, remunerate fairly, and build rad shit together.