create-material

A guide for turning rough story ideas into Markdown source files for a novel project. These files can describe motifs, objects, scene ideas, dialogue ideas, research, themes, images, conflicts, or clues.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create, refine, and save reusable story material in the project's materials folder, including its category, possible use, related story elements, and open questions.
Why use it?
Useful ideas are easy to lose or forget when they remain in scattered notes. This gives each idea a structured place and records how it might serve the story.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/comfuture/novelist/create-material
Any agent
npx skills add comfuture/novelist --skill create-material
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/comfuture/novelist

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 64 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 722 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00064 $0.00722
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00361
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00144
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00072

Measured 2d ago against content hash 01f0edba07c3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

create-material 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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/write_material.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

plugins/novelist/skills/create-material/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Create Material

Overview

Use this skill to turn a rough story-material prompt into a complete materials/*.md source file.

Always follow AGENTS.md and materials/_template.md. Generate useful seed material from the prompt, ask for missing information and intended story use, revise from feedback, then write only after confirmation.

Before running a bundled command, resolve <skill-dir> to the absolute directory containing this SKILL.md. This keeps the same skill usable from either the repository-local skill tree or the Novelist plugin.

Workflow

1. Read Context

Read:

  • AGENTS.md
  • project.md
  • materials/_template.md
  • Existing files in materials/
  • Relevant characters/, macguffins/, plot/, outlines/, and world/ files if referenced

2. Generate A Material Draft

From the user's prompt, infer a compact first-pass material note in Korean. Include:

  • material category, such as scene-seed, motif, object, line, research, theme, image, conflict, or clue
  • raw idea
  • possible story use
  • related characters, MacGuffins, plot threads, or settings
  • whether it is canonical yet
  • constraints, risks, or questions
  • open decisions the user should make

Mark inferred items clearly. Keep uncertain ideas as status: seed and canonical: false.

3. Ask For Direction

Ask the user what role this material should play:

  • background texture or major plot driver
  • literal object or metaphor
  • one-scene use or recurring motif
  • clue, red herring, image system, dialogue seed, or research note
  • canonical fact or scratch seed

Continue the feedback loop until the user says it is enough or gives enough detail to save.

4. Build The Material File

Use a filesystem-safe ASCII slug. Save to materials/<slug>.md; id must be material-<slug>.

Required frontmatter:

id: material-ascii-slug
type: material
title: ""
category: scene-seed
status: seed
source: ""
canonical: false
related_characters: []
related_macguffins: []
plot_threads: []
used_in_chapters: []
created: YYYY-MM-DD
updated: YYYY-MM-DD
tags: []

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 2d ago First seen · 97 lines · 64 tokens per session scan A 01f0edba07c3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

create-material is a skill published in the GitHub repository comfuture/novelist (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 722 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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