Character Management

Creates and maintains structured character profiles, bidirectional relationships, family trees and character arcs for a markdown-based story project.

Content & WritingIntermediate★ 243⑂ 36AI score 9/10Last updated: Sep 24, 2026

What it does

Creates and updates character files (markdown + YAML frontmatter) inside a project's characters/ directory.
Checks candidate names with story names "{Name}" to catch exact clashes with characters, aliases, locations, factions, artifacts and glossary terms, plus look-alike warnings.
Interviews you for appearance, personality, backstory, external want vs internal need, speech patterns, arc beats and timeline events, then fills the bundled character template.
Keeps relationships bidirectional: adding a relation writes the inverse on the other character and updates the registry, relationship map and family-tree sections of characters/_index.md.
Generates Mermaid relationship/family-tree diagrams via story diagram relationships, and runs story reindex ., story links ., story validate . as a maintenance pass.
Supports voice-words / voice-avoid lists so a character's voice can be linted by story voices . (dialogue style itself belongs to the voice-style skill).

Who it's for

Novelists, web-fiction and screenplay writers, or TRPG game masters juggling a large cast.
Writers who want story bibles version-controlled as plain markdown.
Users who already bootstrapped a project with the story-init skill from the same repo.

Examples

"Create a new antagonist" → picks a role, name-clash check, template-based profile, index registration in one pass.
"Make these two siblings" → writes the relation and its inverse in both frontmatters and fixes the family-tree section.
"Show me the family tree" → story diagram relationships --out dist/relationships.mmd, viewable on GitHub or mermaid.live to spot isolated characters or missing generations.

· · · Install guide · · ·

Try it now, no install

Paste this into Claude to use the skill without installing anything.

Read the instructions in this file and follow them to help me:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danjdewhurst/story-skills/HEAD/skills/character-management/SKILL.md

What I want: (describe your task here)

If Claude can't open the link, open it yourself and paste the contents instead.

↓ If it works for you, download the ZIP below and install it. Then it runs on its own — no pasting each time.

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)

Download the ZIP with the button below.
In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.

↓ Download ZIP

Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on Claude Skill Mart.
Copy the skills/character-management folder from the GitHub repo danjdewhurst/story-skills into my ~/.claude/skills/character-management/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/danjdewhurst/story-skills.git && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r story-skills/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

⚠ This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

Open a terminal.
Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/danjdewhurst/story-skills.git
Create the skills folder: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
Copy the skills: cp -r story-skills/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/ (copy all of them — this skill references worldbuilding, voice-style and story-maintenance).
Restart Claude Code.
Initialise a story project first with the story-init skill, and work from the folder containing story.md.
Ask something like "create a character" to trigger it. Without the story CLI installed, fall back to bun run story -- in the repo checkout or node scripts/story.js, or update indexes and backlinks manually.

View source on GitHub ↗License: MIT