✨ Story Skills
Agent Skills for planning, tracking, and drafting fiction in markdown.
Story Skills gives agents a shared project format for fiction: a story bible, character files, worldbuilding notes, factions, artifacts, plot arcs, scene state, continuity questions, promises/payoffs, timelines, and chapter drafts. Everything is plain markdown with YAML frontmatter, packaged as standard Agent Skills with Codex and Claude Code plugin support.
The companion CLI treats the story bible as a checkable contract: a continuity engine catches dead characters walking, payoffs that land before their setup, unfired Chekhov guns, and stale story state — deterministically, before a reader ever could.
Built on the open Agent Skills standard. Install it as a Codex or Claude Code plugin, with the Agent Skills CLI, or copy the skills/ folders into any agent that supports SKILL.md.
🚀 Quick Start
# Codex plugin
codex plugin marketplace add danjdewhurst/story-skills
codex plugin add story-skills@story-skills
# Claude Code plugin
/plugin marketplace add danjdewhurst/story-skills
/plugin install story-skills@story-skills
For compatible SKILL.md agents, you can also install the bundle with the Agent Skills CLI:
npx skills add danjdewhurst/story-skills
# Or with Bun
bunx skills add danjdewhurst/story-skills
Then ask "Start a new story" to scaffold the project.
🔎 The Continuity Engine
Long-range consistency is the thing language models are worst at and prompts cannot fix. Story Skills makes it deterministic: character deaths, promises/payoffs, open questions, scene casts, and durable knowledge/object state live in frontmatter, and story continuity treats contradictions like a compiler treats type errors.
examples/the-unraveled-thread/ is a deliberately broken mystery. It passes story validate and story links cleanly — every file is well-formed — but the story itself doesn't hold together:
$ story continuity examples/the-unraveled-thread
Continuity check failed: 4 errors, 3 warnings
error: chapters/chapter-04.md lists edran-vale, who died in chapter-02; move posthumous appearances to mentions
error: continuity/promises/the-broken-compass.md pays off in chapter-02 before it is planted in chapter-03
error: continuity/questions/who-burned-the-mill.md resolves in chapter-02 before it is introduced in chapter-03
error: continuity/state.md knowledge-state[0] references missing chapter chapter-05
warning: chapters/chapter-03.md POV character nessa-thorn is not listed in characters
warning: continuity/promises/the-sealed-letter.md was planted in chapter-01, 3 chapters ago, and has no payoff yet
warning: continuity/state.md object-state[0] status active conflicts with worldbuilding/artifacts/vales-compass.md status destroyed
These findings are exact, file-addressed, and reproducible — CI asserts them on every commit. Intentional flashbacks and posthumous appearances stay legal via the chapter mentions field. story doctor and story next fold the same checks into prioritized repair actions.
✍️ Highly Recommended: Better Writing
For stronger chapter drafts and revision passes, install forjd/better-writing alongside Story Skills. It adds voice calibration, anti-generic writing checks, and a final prose-quality pass.
npx skills add forjd/better-writing
Or with Bun:
bunx skills add forjd/better-writing
Story Skills works without it, but chapter drafting and revision are better when agents can use better-writing.
📦 Installation
Codex
# Add the marketplace
codex plugin marketplace add danjdewhurst/story-skills
# Install the plugin
codex plugin add story-skills@story-skills
For local skill authoring without a plugin install:
git clone https://github.com/danjdewhurst/story-skills.git
cp -r story-skills/skills/* ~/.agents/skills/
# Or install to a specific repo as repo-scoped skills
cp -r story-skills/skills/* .agents/skills/
Codex detects repo and user skills automatically. The plugin install is still the recommended path for this bundle.
Claude Code
# Add the marketplace
/plugin marketplace add danjdewhurst/story-skills
# Install the plugin
/plugin install story-skills@story-skills
