building-story-stakes

building-story-stakes is a skill for Claude Code from fatihguner/foreman. It costs 76 tokens per session (3,508 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A storytelling guide for making the risks and consequences in a story matter to the audience.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to develop plots, presentations, scripts, or other narratives with clearer tension and consequences.
Why use it?
It helps prevent stories from feeling flat when the outcome does not seem important.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the foreman plugin — 142 skills, 60 commands, 7 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to develop plots, presentations, scripts, or other narratives with clearer tension and consequences.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fatihguner/foreman/building-story-stakes
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 fatihguner/foreman --skill building-story-stakes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fatihguner/foreman

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install foreman, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 142 skills, 60 commands, 7 agents.

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 building-story-stakes

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fatihguner/foreman/building-story-stakes/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fatihguner/foreman/building-story-stakes)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fatihguner/foreman/building-story-stakes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fatihguner/foreman/building-story-stakes/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 building-story-stakes

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fatihguner/foreman/building-story-stakes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fatihguner/foreman/building-story-stakes.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,508 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Memory Poisoning · line 49
    Skill manipulates agent memory, state, or stored context. Memory corruption can alter personality, override safety rules, or cause unpredictable behavior.
    Fix: Protect agent memory and state from modification by untrusted content. Use read-only memory for critical instructions and validate all state changes.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00076 $0.03508
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01754
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00702
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00351

Measured 6d ago against content hash 5b797a3f040f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

building-story-stakes 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 6d 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.

plugins/foreman/skills/building-story-stakes/SKILL.md · 210 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 210 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Read runtime and advisory rules before applying this skill. Other Foreman layers and the catalog are in ../../content/, relative to this SKILL.md.

Building Story Stakes

What keeps a listener hooked is not curiosity. It is the elephant you planted at the beginning -- the question they desperately need answered. Stakes are the gears that make stories work; without them, any narrative, however polished, becomes something an audience can take or leave. The framework identifies five discrete techniques for infusing stakes into a story, each learnable and each deployable in settings ranging from a Moth stage to a Series A pitch meeting. The entrepreneur who masters these techniques does not merely tell stories. That entrepreneur controls attention.


The Framework

Stakes answer a deceptively simple question: would the audience want to hear the next sentence? If the answer is no, the story has failed -- not in content, but in architecture. These five strategies address different failure modes of attention, and they work in combination. Some stories need all five. Others, naturally loaded with drama, need only the first. The key is diagnosis: knowing which strategy a given moment demands.

1. The Elephant

Every story must have an Elephant. The Elephant is the large, obvious thing in the room -- a clear statement of the need, the want, the problem, the peril, or the mystery. It tells the audience what to expect, gives them a reason to wonder, and infuses the story with instantaneous stakes.

The Elephant should appear within the first sixty seconds. Thirty seconds is better. Storytellers lack the luxury of trailers; when a speaker begins, the audience has no idea whether they are hearing a comedy, a tragedy, or a waste of their morning. Without an early Elephant, listeners check out.

The distinction matters. Consider two openings for the same company origin story:

  • Version A: "Our co-founder grew up in a small town in Ohio. She studied engineering at State. She worked at three companies before starting ours."
  • Version B: "When our co-founder was twenty-six, she bet her entire savings -- $11,400 -- on a product nobody in her industry believed would work. Our co-founder grew up in a small town in Ohio..."

Read the full file on GitHub · 210 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. 6d ago Changed · +209 lines · +76 tokens per session 5b797a3f040f
  2. 12d ago First seen · 1 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A e437c84b232a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

building-story-stakes is a skill published in the GitHub repository fatihguner/foreman (50 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 3,508 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-30.

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