Connection Gravity

Connection Gravity is a session prep tool that surfaces world entities most relevant to what is happening right now. It is not prescriptive — it shows you what is connected, not what you should do.

Find it in two places: the Gravity panel in Session Mode, and the session prep sidebar available during pre-session planning.

How it works

Gravity ranks suggestions using four factors applied in combination:

Relationship depth to pinned entities. The strongest base signal. When you pin an entity in Session Mode, Gravity looks at every entity directly linked to it — by wikilinks and explicit relationship entries — and surfaces those first. Then it looks one step further out, to entities connected to those connections. Closer links rank higher.

Recent session history. Entities that appeared in your last two or three sessions carry a recency boost. If the Magistrate showed up last session and you are back in the capital city, Gravity surfaces her higher than a character who has not appeared in months.

Character anchors. If you have set up character anchors for the party, threatened anchors and unresolved threads from those anchors surface with priority in character-first mode (see below).

Four-factor gravity formula

Beyond the base ranking, Gravity automatically applies four adjustments to every suggestion:

Hub dampening (automatic). Entities with many relationships — faction leaders, major cities, central NPCs — are automatically dampened so they don't dominate every session regardless of what is happening. An NPC with 40 relationships gets a lower weight multiplier than one with 3. This keeps suggestions contextually varied rather than always defaulting to the most-connected node in your world.

Recency dampening (automatic). An entity you pinned this session or last session yields space for something new. The dampening fades over two sessions — after three or more sessions without a pin, that entity is ranked with no penalty. This prevents the same entities from occupying every Gravity result just because you use them often.

Recurrence promotion (automatic). The flip side of recency dampening: an entity you have pinned across three or more separate sessions is gaining narrative significance. Gravity recognizes this signal and promotes recurring entities — an NPC who has appeared in six sessions gets a meaningful boost over a similar NPC you have only used once.

Accessibility (GM-set). Each entity has an accessibility setting you control. This is your explicit statement about how narratively reachable the entity is right now. Four levels:

Level	Gravity effect	Use when
Public	Normal weight (default)	Entity is available and reachable
Guarded	Reduced weight (0.5×)	Entity is hard to reach, in hiding, or behind barriers
Reclusive	Strongly reduced (0.2×)	Entity almost never surfaces; requires specific conditions
Hidden	Near-zero weight (0.05×)	Entity exists but should not appear in suggestions

Set accessibility from the entity's detail page using the Accessibility picker. This is the one factor you control directly — the other three are automatic.

Gravity dots

Each suggested entity shows one to three dots next to its name:

Three dots — strong relevance, high relationship depth or recent session presence
Two dots — moderate relevance, connected but not immediately adjacent
One dot — weak relevance, surfaced because of a second- or third-degree connection

Use dots as a rough guide. A one-dot suggestion is not unimportant — it is something that might become relevant if the session moves in a certain direction.

Anchor suggestion badge

When an entity has been pinned across enough sessions, the Gravity panel shows a small ⚓ anchor? badge next to it. This is a prompt: the entity is becoming recurring, and you may want to add it as a relationship anchor for a party character.

Click the badge to expand a quick popover — it shows the session pin count and links directly to the Character Stakes Dashboard where you can set the anchor. Click Not now to dismiss the suggestion for the current session. The badge reappears in future sessions if the entity continues accumulating pins.

Practical workflow

The most common use: pin the location where this session takes place. Gravity immediately surfaces NPCs whose articles wikilink to that location, factions tied to it, and items last seen there. Pin one or two of those NPCs — Gravity now surfaces their factions, associates, and enemies. Within a few pins, you have a web of entities relevant to the session without manually searching for them.

💡Tip

Pin the location first, then the NPCs, then any items the party is carrying. Each new pin recalculates the gravity rankings. The panel updates in real time.

Character-first mode

👑 Runekeeper

When character anchors are configured for the campaign, toggle Character-first mode at the top of the Gravity panel. In this mode:

Threatened anchors (NPC relationships, places, or beliefs the party has at risk) surface first regardless of location-based connections
Unresolved threads tagged to player characters appear at the top of the list
Pure world-connection suggestions appear below, ranked as normal

Character-first mode is most useful in character-driven campaigns where NPC relationships and player backstory hooks matter more than location-based context.

Improving accuracy

Gravity is only as useful as your world's link network. The more wikilinks and relationships you build, the better the suggestions become.

Concrete steps that help:

Add [[wikilinks]] whenever you mention an NPC, location, or faction in an article body — each link is an edge Gravity can traverse
Use the relationship web to create typed connections (lieutenant of, rival to, owns, located in) — these carry more weight than plain wikilinks
Run post-session debriefs consistently — session history feeds recency data back into Gravity
Set accessibility levels on entities that are narratively off-limits — this prevents Gravity from surfacing things the party simply cannot reach right now

📝Note

Gravity needs a few sessions of history before its recency-based suggestions become noticeably accurate. In early sessions, lean on the pin-based suggestions, which work from day one as long as your world has wikilinks.

What Gravity does not do

Gravity does not know what story you are trying to tell. It surfaces connections — it does not rank entities by narrative importance or dramatic weight. An innkeeper linked to the current location shows up alongside the villain if they are both connected to the same node.

That is by design. Gravity is a map of what is nearby in your world's graph. You decide what matters.

Troubleshooting

The Gravity panel is empty even though I have entities pinned. Gravity requires wikilinks or explicit relationships between entities to generate suggestions. If your pinned entities have no connections to other entities in the world, there is nothing to surface. Add [[wikilinks]] to the pinned entity's article, or use the Relationship panel to connect it to other entities. The panel updates in real time as connections are added.

Connection Gravity keeps surfacing irrelevant entities. Gravity ranks by link distance — it cannot distinguish narratively important connections from incidental ones. If an entity keeps surfacing incorrectly, check whether it has a wikilink or relationship to something you frequently pin. Remove accidental links from that entity's article to reduce its gravity weight. You can also set the entity's accessibility to Guarded or Reclusive to reduce its weight without removing links.

Character-first mode isn't appearing in the Gravity panel. Character-first mode requires Runekeeper tier and configured character anchors. If you are on Weaver or Chronicler, the toggle will not appear. If you are on Runekeeper but the toggle is still missing, confirm character anchors have been set up for at least one player character in the campaign's character panel.

Gravity suggestions aren't improving after several sessions. Gravity's recency and recurrence signals depend on completed post-session debriefs. If you have been skipping debriefs, that session history is not feeding back into the ranking. Run the debrief after each session — even a quick pass through the key fields is enough for Gravity to register the session.

A high-connection NPC never appears even though I pin their location. Hub dampening reduces the weight of highly-connected entities to prevent them dominating every session. If a specific NPC is important right now, pin them directly — a direct pin overrides dampening and keeps them in view for the session.