Reading the relationship graph

A world built entirely from isolated facts is just a list. The moment you draw a line between two entities — "this NPC commands that faction," "this cult worships this deity," "this lord is the vassal of that empire" — you create something alive. That line is a story waiting to happen.

The relationship graph makes every one of those lines visible at once.

Why connections make worlds matter

In TTRPG storytelling, the most powerful moments rarely come from a single entity in isolation. They come from the web around it: who owes whom a debt, which factions are quietly at war, which NPC holds leverage over another. Characters are defined by what they belong to, who they answer to, and who answers to them.

A villain is threatening because of the network behind them. A city feels real because of the factions competing inside it. A mystery has weight because there is a chain of connections the players can follow — if they ask the right questions.

The relationship graph is how you see that structure. Not just one node at a time in an article sidebar, but the whole shape of it.

The graph as a narrative map

Open Graph in your world's sidebar. What you are looking at is a map of your world's social and narrative fabric — every entity as a node, every wikilink and relationship as an edge.

The most connected nodes are your hubs of influence: faction leaders, major cities, ancient artifacts with a long history of owners. The isolated nodes are gaps — entities that exist but have not been woven in yet. The dense clusters are the moments of highest narrative tension.

What to look for:

Clusters — tight groups of entities that reference each other heavily. These are your factions, guilds, social circles. A story that enters one of these clusters will have a lot to pull on.
Bridges — single nodes or thin chains that connect two otherwise-separate clusters. These are your cross-faction characters, the defectors, the merchants who deal with everyone. Bridges are often the most narratively interesting nodes in a world.
Hubs — nodes with an unusually high number of edges. These are your power centers. The nodes that everything points toward.
Periphery nodes — lightly connected entities at the edge of the graph. Newcomers, outcasts, secrets. Low connectivity can be just as meaningful as high connectivity.

The graph answers a question that is hard to answer from articles alone: how do these two entities connect?

Your players want an audience with the Queen. They know a tavern keeper. Is there a path? Open the graph, find the tavern keeper node, and trace the edges outward: she Supplies the Iron Watch garrison → the garrison Reports To the City Watch Commander → the Commander Commands the Queen's Guard → the Guard is Member Of the Royal Household. There is your social ladder.

These paths are the veins through which influence flows. Characters who understand which paths exist — and which ones can be walked — can navigate a political world as competently as a dungeon. Characters who do not know the paths are lost in the same world.

This is the core of social TTRPG play: finding the route. The graph makes the routes visible so you can design them deliberately and surface them through play.

Power ladders and chains of authority

The Hierarchy layout (available in the layout toolbar) arranges nodes top-down, sorted by the direction of relationships. Entities that command sit above entities that report. Entities that lead factions sit above their members.

Switch to Hierarchy layout and your world's power structure becomes immediately legible:

Who is at the top? Who reports to them? How many layers of command separate the party from the person who actually makes decisions?
Are there parallel command structures that could conflict? (Two factions both claiming authority over the same region. Two commanders who both believe they outrank each other.)
Where is the weakest link in a chain of command — the mid-level figure with too many connections, too much access, and too little loyalty?

The hierarchy layout is not just organizational. It maps narrative difficulty. The higher the node, the harder — and more rewarding — it is for the party to reach it.

Hidden networks: what the graph reveals when you filter

Filtering the graph is how you peel back layers of your world to see structures that are invisible when everything is displayed at once.

Filter by entity type

Show only Factions to see the political map of your world stripped of individual characters. Which factions are connected? Which are isolated? Which faction sits at the center of many alliances — and is therefore the most dangerous to antagonize?

Show only NPCs to see the social graph of your characters. Who is central? Who is on the margins? Where are the unaffiliated characters who might shift allegiance?

Filter by allegiance color

The color of each edge tells you the nature of a connection:

Color	What it represents
Violet	A personal bond — loyalty to an individual
Amber	An institutional tie — loyalty to a faction or organization
Emerald	A cause bond — loyalty to a belief, deity, or ideal

A node surrounded by amber edges is deeply embedded in an institution. Removing those connections (or the institution itself) would leave this person adrift. A node with many violet edges has built their power through personal loyalty rather than title — far more resilient, and far more dangerous when those loyalties shift.

A hidden cult does not announce itself in amber. It operates through violet edges — personal debts, private vows, secrets shared in the dark. Look for clusters of violet in your graph that should not have close personal ties. That cluster might be your hidden network.

Filter by tag

Tag your entities to track things the relationship type does not capture: which NPCs belong to a secret society, which locations are compromised, which factions are secretly aligned despite appearing neutral.

Filter the graph by that tag and the hidden structure surfaces. All the nodes you tagged form their own sub-graph, and their relationships to each other — and to the rest of the world — become legible.

Stubs: the shape of what you haven't built yet

Filter for stubs only — entities that have been referenced but not yet written. These ghost nodes are the outline of your world's unexplored territory. They appear in the graph because something already references them. They represent threads you have started pulling that haven't unraveled yet.

Stubs clustered around a single entity suggest that entity is more important than their article currently reflects. The world is already gravitating toward them.

Layout strategies for different questions

Each layout answers a different question about your world's structure.

Layout	Best for
Network (default)	Seeing the overall topology — clusters, hubs, periphery
Hierarchy	Tracing chains of command and authority
Cluster	Identifying faction groupings and cross-faction bridges
Radial / Ego	Understanding one entity's immediate world — centered on them, rings by distance
Causal	Tracing event chains — what sparked what, what led to what
Concentric	Identifying hubs vs. peripheral nodes based on connection count

Use Radial / Ego layout centered on the party's primary antagonist. Who is in their immediate ring? Who is two steps out? If the party can reach anyone in the first ring, they can apply pressure. The layout turns abstract graph structure into a tactical picture of access and leverage.

The mini-graph on entity pages

Every entity page shows a mini-graph in the right sidebar: that entity's immediate neighborhood, with all its connections visible at a glance. This is the local view — useful when you already know which entity you care about and want to see what surrounds it without opening the full graph.

Click any node in the mini-graph to navigate to that entity. Click the expand icon to open the full graph centered on that entity.

The mini-graph is fast to read at the table. Use it when a player asks "who does this NPC know?" and you need the answer in seconds.

Building the graph intentionally

The graph only reveals structure that you have built. An NPC with no relationships is a dead end — there is no social path through them, no ladder they belong to, no network they connect. When you create a new entity, ask:

Who do they answer to? (Reports To, Member Of, Vassal Of)
Who answers to them? (Commands, Leader Of, Patron Of)
Who are they in tension with? (Rivals, At War With, Betrayed)
What cause or institution defines them? (Worships, Allied With, Ordained By)

Even two or three relationships per entity is enough to create a traversable graph. A world where every NPC has at least one relationship to a faction and one relationship to another NPC is a world with social paths running through it in every direction.

💡Tip

When you are stuck on a prep session, open the graph in Hierarchy or Cluster layout and look for nodes with no relationships outside their immediate faction. Those isolated figures are often the most interesting ones to connect — giving them a cross-faction tie or an unexpected personal loyalty creates new paths through the world.

Worlds are built from connections

The individual facts about a city — its name, its size, its rulers — are scaffolding. What makes that city feel real is who controls which quarter, which guilds are competing for the docks contract, which noble family is quietly funding the thieves who sabotage their rivals' shipments.

None of that is visible in a single article. All of it is visible in the graph.

Build the connections deliberately. Filter the graph to read them. Let your players walk the paths — find the ladder to the top, uncover the hidden network, trace the web back to whoever is pulling strings. That is the story.