fear

fear is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts. It costs 56 tokens per session (650 once invoked), scanned A, original, CC0-1.0.

A planning method that imagines a project or decision has failed, then works backward to identify likely causes and risks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for pre-mortems, worst-case analysis, risk lists, and ranking failure modes by likelihood and severity.
Why use it?
It counters overconfidence and exposes problems that an optimistic plan may overlook before time or money is committed.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it for pre-mortems, worst-case analysis, risk lists, and ranking failure modes by likelihood and severity.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/fear
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 Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts --skill fear
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts

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 fear

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/fear/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/fear)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/fear"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/fear/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 fear

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/fear"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/fear.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 650 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 $0.00056 $0.00650
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00325
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00130
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00065

Measured 9d ago against content hash 0fd783607f91, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

fear 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 9d 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.

generated/hermes/influence-and-behavior/fear/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Fear

Amplify worst-case scenarios to surface risks that optimism hides.

What This Skill Does

Fear makes targets run from danger. The real-world version is structured pessimism: pre-mortem analysis, worst-case scenario generation, and risk amplification exercises that counteract the natural optimism bias in planning. Fear is the antidote to "it'll probably be fine." In this grimoire, Fear is treated as a metaphorical spell with a shipping-now delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Fear (spell).

When To Use

  • A team is moving forward on a plan with insufficient risk analysis.
  • You need a pre-mortem: imagine this project failed — why?
  • Optimism bias is hiding real risks that need to be surfaced before committing resources.

Prerequisites

  • No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.

Procedure

  1. Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
  2. Take the plan, project, or decision as input.
  3. Assume it failed catastrophically. Work backward: what went wrong?
  4. Generate the 5-10 most plausible failure modes, ranked by likelihood and severity.
  5. For each failure mode, note whether it is preventable, mitigable, or unavoidable.
  6. Deliver the fear inventory with a recommendation on which risks to address before proceeding.
  7. Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.

Deliverables

  • A ranked failure mode inventory: the most plausible ways this could go wrong.
  • For each failure mode: likelihood, severity, and whether it can be prevented or only mitigated.

Pitfalls / Guardrails

  • Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
  • Fear should inform decisions, not paralyze them. Always close with a clear recommendation: proceed, proceed with mitigations, or stop.
  • Do not catastrophize for effect. Every failure mode must be plausible, not just scary.

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 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. 9d ago First seen · 67 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 0fd783607f91

Subscribe to this mod's changes

fear is a skill published in the GitHub repository Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts (107 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 650 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 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

event-planner

Event planning with timelines, budgets, vendor coordination, logistics checklists, and post-event evaluation. Use when organizing conferences, workshops, galas, or corporate events.

travisjneuman/.claude · 37 tokens

hr-talent

HR and talent management expertise for talent acquisition, performance management, compensation strategy, organizational design, culture building, succession planning, and D&I programs. Use when hiring, managing performance, designing organizations, or building culture.

travisjneuman/.claude · 47 tokens

hr-people-operations

Help HR managers, People Ops specialists, HRIS administrators, and HR generalists understand, design, and run core people operations processes. Use when asked to design an onboarding workflow, set up an HRIS, build an offboarding checklist, create an employee handbook, audit HR data quality, design a people ops…

tuanductran/hr-skills · 101 tokens

hr-hris

Help HR managers, HR operations teams, and recruiters understand HRIS (Human Resource Information Systems), including HRIS platforms, implementation and migration, system integrations, employee data management, HR automation, and HRIS-related hiring. Use when asked to explain HRIS, choose an HRIS platform, implement…

tuanductran/hr-skills · 103 tokens

hr-wellbeing

Help HR business partners, wellbeing program managers, and people leaders understand, design, and run employee wellbeing, mental health, and work-life balance initiatives. Use when asked to design a wellbeing program, run a burnout risk assessment, build a mental health support plan, design a flexible work policy…

tuanductran/hr-skills · 97 tokens

hr-workforce-planning

Help HR managers with workforce planning and strategy. Use when asked to create a workforce plan, conduct a skills gap analysis, develop a succession plan, build workforce models, analyze headcount, forecast long-term workforce needs, develop workforce diversity strategies, or any workforce planning task.

tuanductran/hr-skills · 60 tokens