character-card-builder

character-card-builder is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Calliope-Editor/writing-skills. It costs 96 tokens per session (1,983 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An interview-style tool for developing a fictional character from a rough idea into a structured character card. It asks one focused question at a time and organises the writer’s answers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before or during drafting to explore a character’s traits, motives, history, and contradictions. It is also useful for turning scattered notes into a standard character reference.
Why use it?
It helps when a character has a name, image, or role but does not yet feel like a complete person. It avoids filling in unanswered details on the writer’s behalf.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it before or during drafting to explore a character’s traits, motives, history, and contradictions. It is also useful for turning scattered notes into a standard character reference.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/character-card-builder
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Calliope-Editor/writing-skills --skill character-card-builder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Calliope-Editor/writing-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for character-card-builder

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/character-card-builder/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/character-card-builder)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/character-card-builder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/character-card-builder/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for character-card-builder

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/character-card-builder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/calliope-editor/writing-skills/character-card-builder.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,983 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00096 $0.01983
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00992
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00397
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00198

Measured 11d ago against content hash 0653ad22ca50, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

character-card-builder scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/character/character-card-builder/SKILL.md · 81 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Turn a half-formed idea into a full, standard character card — through interview, one sharp question at a time, so the character stays the author's invention.

The one rule

This skill asks, probes, and organises. It never writes or rewrites the author's prose, and it never invents the character for the writer. It draws the character out through questions and shapes the writer's own answers into a card.

The hard part of that rule is the temptation to help too much. The research on interviewing is blunt about the risk: a leading question doesn't merely bias an answer, it can implant a detail the writer later remembers as their own. So the skill holds a discipline — it asks what you can actually answer, builds each question from your words, and when you're stuck it never fills the blank with a trait it picked. If it offers options, they're a contrasting menu to react against — two poles, not one suggestion — always yours to reject, and only ever a prompt, never a decision. A blank you can't fill is information (the character isn't formed there yet), not a hole for the tool to plug.

Intake — start wherever you are

Bring whatever you have — a name, an image, a role in the plot, or just a feeling. You don't need a framework or a finished idea; a blank page is a fine place to begin. Tell it the seed and, if you can, the story the character will live in, so the questions fit the book rather than a void.

It adapts to how you work: if you're a planner who wants the checklist, it'll be systematic; if you're a discovery writer who finds questionnaires deadening, it follows the thread instead of marching a list. Either way it asks one question at a time — never a wall of fields.

What the interview is aiming at

Under the conversation, the skill follows one causal spine — the load-bearing chain the character-craft traditions converge on:

wound → the lie it taught → the fear → the need → the surface want

It interviews toward that chain: the formative injury, the false belief it planted, what the character is afraid of, the deeper thing they actually need, and the conscious goal they'd name out loud. Everything else — looks, habits, favourites, the full biography — is optional texture, invited only when it changes what the character does under pressure (Egri's test: it isn't enough to know a trait, you have to know why it matters).

Read the full file on GitHub · 81 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 81 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 0653ad22ca50

Subscribe to this mod's changes

character-card-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository Calliope-Editor/writing-skills (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 1,983 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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