character-bible

A Claude Code skill that turns any novel into a production-ready character bible: design sheets, portraits, and AI-video reference packs (Seedance via fal/Replicate).

Point it at a .txt or .md book and get:

• characters.json - every character with role, arc, relationships, voice profile, and appearance where every stated trait carries its verbatim quote and every inferred detail is labeled as inference; plus a world anchor (era, place, palette, lighting, style) that keeps shots consistent, and settings - locations and props, grounded and prompt-ready;
• sheets/<name>.md - one design sheet per character and per setting;
• report.html - a self-contained report (no external requests, light and dark), readable anywhere;
• a prompt pack per character: an image-generation portrait prompt and a six-field Seedance video prompt (subject, action, scene, style, camera, sound).

Optionally, after an itemized cost estimate you confirm, it generates portraits (GPT Image 2 on fal) and short character videos (Seedance 2.5 on fal or Replicate) from those prompts.

Who this is for: AI-video creators who need consistent character references, authors who want a continuity bible, and adaptation pre-production (comics, animation, audio drama, games).

What it looks like

The generated report.html is self-contained and theme-aware. It renders here in your GitHub theme:

Every stated trait carries its verbatim quote, and each character ships a portrait prompt and a six-field Seedance prompt:

Generated from the prompt pack

The portrait above and the images below were generated from the bible's own prompts (GPT Image on fal). Characters, locations, and props hold together because every prompt is written against the shared world anchor:

Della (character)

Jim (character)

The flat (location)

The fob chain (prop)

_{Demo built from the bundled fixture, O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi (1905, public domain).}

Install

Cloning the files is the whole install - nothing executes, no dependencies, no install scripts, no symlinks:

git clone https://github.com/smkrv/character-bible ~/.claude/skills/character-bible

Or without git:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/character-bible
curl -sL https://github.com/smkrv/character-bible/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz \
  | tar xz --strip-components=1 -C ~/.claude/skills/character-bible

Requirements

• Claude Code (the pipeline runs on its subagents).
• One of: Deno (recommended - the docs show sandboxed invocations), Bun, or Node 22.18+. The bundled utilities are dependency-free TypeScript on node: builtins; nothing gets installed.
• Only for optional generation: FAL_KEY and/or REPLICATE_API_TOKEN in the environment.

Use

In Claude Code:

Build a character bible from ~/books/my-novel.txt

The skill chunks the text, extracts characters with parallel subagents (quotes required for every claim), merges duplicates deterministically, validates against a fixed schema, and renders the report. Style presets for prompts: european-photoreal (default) and european-painterly; the book's own evidence always overrides the preset. Then, if you ask for portraits or videos, it shows the dollar estimate first and waits.

Verify the utilities yourself, offline:

deno run --allow-read --allow-write=tmp-test scripts/test.ts

Safety model

• Install is inert. You copy files; nothing runs.
• The scripts never touch the network. No network code, no env reads, no shell-outs; under Deno they run with read/write access to the working folders only. All API calls are explicit, documented curl requests that happen only in the generation step, only after you confirm the cost.
• Your book is treated as untrusted data. The extraction protocol instructs agents to ignore instruction-like content inside the text.
• Keys stay in the environment. Never printed, never written to outputs. No telemetry of any kind.
• CI runs the offline suite on Deno, Bun, and Node - with no secrets available to it.

How it stays current

Model facts (endpoints, prices, limits) live only in references/providers/, each fact with a verification date and a free re-verification protocol. Adding a new image or video model is one snapshot file; the pipeline does not change.

License

MIT. The bundled test fixture is O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi (1905, public domain).