narrative

A guided process for developing the story and main message of a presentation before designing its slides. It asks sequential questions about the audience, purpose, and story arc, then produces a checked narrative document.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan talks, shape slide narratives, or revise the underlying message of an existing presentation.
Why use it?
It helps turn a rough presentation idea into a clear argument and flow. For an existing slide deck, it can first describe the story it appears to tell and focus revisions on what should change.

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/michaelengland/deckwright/narrative
Any agent
npx skills add michaelengland/deckwright --skill narrative
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/michaelengland/deckwright

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,582 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 $0.00057 $0.01582
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00791
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00316
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00158

Measured 2d ago against content hash 20a68ca15791, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

narrative 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.

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/narrative/SKILL.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Narrative

Develop the story and message before thinking about slides. This skill converts rough presentation ideas into validated narrative documents through collaborative dialogue.

Prerequisites

  • User has a presentation idea, topic, or goal, OR
  • A PptxGenJS generation script exists from a previous import or creation (edit mode)

Process

Edit Mode Check

Before starting, check: does a deck folder in decks/ contain a PptxGenJS generation script (a .js file containing require("pptxgenjs"))?

  • If no: This is a new presentation. Follow the standard process below.
  • If yes: This is an edit. Read the generation script to understand the current slides, then:
    1. Summarize the narrative you see in the deck — audience, purpose, key message, and story arc as you interpret them from the slide content and speaker notes
    2. Present this to the user as your interpretation:

      "Based on the current deck, here's the narrative I see:

      • Audience: [inferred]
      • Key message: [inferred]
      • Arc: [slide-by-slide summary of the story flow]

      What would you like to change about the story?"

    3. Focus questioning only on what the user wants to change — skip settled topics
    4. Produce a narrative document as usual, noting which parts are unchanged vs. reworked

1. Understand the Context

Before asking questions, review any existing context:

  • User's initial request and goals
  • Any documents, data, or materials they've shared
  • Prior conversation context

2. Sequential Questioning

Ask ONE question at a time. Favor multiple-choice when possible.

Core questions to explore (adapt based on context):

  1. Audience: Who will see this? What do they already know? What do they care about?
  2. Purpose: What should the audience think, feel, or do after seeing this?
  3. Key message: If they remember only ONE thing, what should it be?
  4. Constraints: Time limit? Existing template or brand guidelines?
  5. Content: What evidence, data, or examples support the message?
  6. Sources: What source materials, documents, reports, or data back up the claims?

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 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. 2d ago First seen · 166 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A 20a68ca15791

Subscribe to this mod's changes

narrative is a skill published in the GitHub repository michaelengland/deckwright (2 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 1,582 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

ppt-master

AI-driven presentation workflow for generating editable PPTX decks and slides, reconstructing page visuals, creating reusable Brand/Style/Layout/Deck workspaces, filling native PPTX templates, and enhancing finished PPTX files. Use when the user asks to create, generate, reconstruct, regenerate, beautify, redesign…

hugohe3/ppt-master · 108 tokens

codex-ppt

Generate visually unified image-based PPT/PPTX decks from articles, reports, papers, notes, or outlines.

ningzimu/codex-ppt-skill · 27 tokens

impress-presentations

Use when creating, opening, or editing LibreOffice Impress ODP presentations, or PPTX decks only when PowerPoint compatibility is explicitly required.

agent0ai/agent-zero · 33 tokens

deep-ppt

Use when creating or revising research-style PowerPoint decks for lab meetings, journal clubs, defenses, weekly reports, or conferences, especially Chinese or English academic slides that need a resumable agent workflow, the deepPPT blue title system, evidence-led layouts, selective red key findings, package checks…

jiadizhunine/deepPPT · 69 tokens

themed-cn-pptx

Build, modify, and QA-verify Chinese + IP/character-themed + QR-embeddable EDITABLE PPTX decks using PptxGenJS, with SOTA AI image generation via OpenAI GPT Image 2 or Google Nano Banana Pro, locked aesthetic recipes, and a deterministic render-QA gate (CJK overflow, text overlap, editable-text, color contrast).…

CacinieP/ppt-skills · 128 tokens

imagegen-pptx-pipeline

End-to-end stateful workflow for designing and generating editable PowerPoint decks from briefs, templates, reference decks, brand assets, data, ImageGen comps, or user-supplied slide images. Uses multi-round content/style confirmation, reviewed per-slide comps, mandatory Real-ESRGAN 4K comp/icon upscaling, built-in…

eddyzzl/imagegen-pptx-pipeline · 141 tokens