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.
npx skills add rondorkerin/gamestack --skill permadeath-and-lethalitygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rondorkerin/gamestackWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/permadeath-and-lethality)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/permadeath-and-lethality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/permadeath-and-lethality/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/permadeath-and-lethality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/permadeath-and-lethality.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00196 | $0.00973 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00098 | $0.00487 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00039 | $0.00195 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00097 |
Grade A, and why
permadeath-and-lethality 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 41 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Permadeath, Lethality & Meta-Progression
How to make death create stakes instead of frustration: a hand-authored fairness/readability backbone first, mitigations that cut the cost of failure without removing stakes, meta-progression that makes failure progress, and an honest treatment of the genuinely-unsolved case — single-save permadeath over a long-form open world.
When to use this
- Designing permadeath / single-save / high-lethality combat and its difficulty curve
- Deciding the roguelike↔roguelite position (what persists across death)
- Designing meta-progression and a diegetic death/return frame
- Picking an anti-save-scum model (delete-on-load, deterministic seed, hyper-RNG, consequence-delay)
- Tackling long-form open-world permadeath (the novel, playtest-required case — Area 4)
- Diagnosing unfair deaths, first-big-loss churn, grind-to-win, or audience-cliff problems
Scope
This skill owns failure, lethality, and persistence-across-death. Adjacent concerns live in siblings:
- Telegraphing/readability as combat craft →
combat-design(this skill treats it as a fairness backbone for generation) - Loot/economy/progression numbers (incl. the finite-legendary manifest) →
rpg-systems - The lore that justifies death/persistence diegetically →
worldbuilding-and-lore(ludonarrative harmony) - "Interesting decisions," flow, loss-aversion framing →
game-design-fundamentals - Generating fair encounters + gating them →
procedural-generation,procgen-review - The world-state persistence schema as content →
systemic-emergent-design
How the pieces fit
GUIDE.md— the why: four areas (fairness, mitigations, meta-progression, the single-save long-form open-world open question), each with exemplars, citations, a "test for" criterion, a named failure mode, and the procedural/AI-authoring implication.CHECKLIST.md— the what to do: Do/Don't + Test-for, grouped by area.
Source & epistemic status. Distilled from a deep-research synthesis (Sid Meier on interesting decisions; Spelunky/Derek Yu on fairness; Kasavin on Hades; XCOM RNG determinism; the Berlin Interpretation; Kahneman & Tversky loss aversion; Crusader Kings / Dwarf Fortress / Rogue Legacy / NetHack for succession). Areas 1–3 rest on shipped short-run games. Area 4 — single-save + long-form open world — is genuinely under-explored; every Area-4 rule is an extrapolation from adjacent genres and must be playtested. The two ⚠️ HEAVY FLAGS from the source are preserved verbatim in GUIDE.md §4.
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.
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.
- 11d ago First seen · 41 lines · 196 tokens per session scan A 2ddfae590000
permadeath-and-lethality is a skill published in the GitHub repository rondorkerin/gamestack (28 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 196 tokens to every session and 973 once invoked, about $0.0010 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
ux-design
Guided, section-by-section UX spec authoring for a screen, flow, or HUD. Reads game concept, player journey, and relevant GDDs to provide context-aware design guidance. Produces ux-spec.md (per screen/flow) or hud-design.md using the studio templates.
architecture-review
Validates completeness and consistency of the project architecture against all GDDs. Builds a traceability matrix mapping every GDD technical requirement to ADRs, identifies coverage gaps, detects cross-ADR conflicts, verifies engine compatibility consistency across all decisions, and produces a PASS/CONCERNS/FAIL…
localize
Full localization pipeline: scan for hardcoded strings, extract and manage string tables, validate translations, generate translator briefings, run cultural/sensitivity review, manage VO localization, test RTL/platform requirements, enforce string freeze, and report coverage.
vertical-slice
Pre-Production validation — build a production-quality end-to-end build to confirm the full game loop is achievable before committing to Production. Run after GDDs, architecture, and UX specs are complete. Produces a PROCEED/PIVOT/KILL verdict that gates the Pre-Production → Production transition.
quick-design
Lightweight design spec for small changes — tuning adjustments, minor mechanics, balance tweaks. Skips full GDD authoring when a system GDD already exists or the change is too small to warrant one. Produces a Quick Design Spec that embeds directly into story files.
day-one-patch
Prepare a day-one patch for a game launch. Scopes, prioritises, implements, and QA-gates a focused patch addressing known issues discovered after gold master but before or immediately after public launch. Treats the patch as a mini-sprint with its own QA gate and rollback plan.