Relationship Web

The Relationship Web shows the connections between your world’s entries as a graph: who’s related to whom, who serves whom, who knows what. It’s a Pro worldbuilding tool that works alongside the World Bible, the Time Weaver, the Lexicon Engine, and the Consistency Sentinel.

Focus on one entity

Open the tool, pick a world, and choose an entity in the Focus On picker. The picker has typeahead and groups options by entity type (Character, Faction, Location, and so on) so a long list of characters doesn’t drown the few factions you’re looking for.

The graph around your focal entity shows direct edges first: who they’re related to, allied with, opposed by, or based at. Click an edge to open the relationship details.

Relationship details

Each edge has:

• A relationship type: friend, parent, sibling, member, captain, rival, and so on. Types come from your entity templates’ linked-entry fields plus any relationships you’ve added manually.
• Notes: the things only you know. “Talim raised Sally after the storm of Year 12.” Notes are private to the world owner.
• Across-time entries: timeline pins where both parties appear together. The Relationship Web reads the Time Weaver to surface every moment your focal entity met or worked with the other party, so you don’t have to remember every cross-reference yourself.

You can edit notes inline without leaving the panel. Click Edit notes, type, and save. The change broadcasts to any other tab you have open on the same entity, so the World Bible Builder updates without a refresh.

Edit an entity without leaving the web

Click a dot (a node) on the graph and a panel opens with two tabs. Relationships lists every connection that entity has, with its tension if you have that turned on. Details is the entity’s full record from the World Bible: its name, type fields, aliases, notes, and name profile, the same form you would use in the bible itself.

So when you spot a character on the map and realize their title is wrong, or you want to flesh out a faction you only just added, you fix it right there. Save and the graph relabels itself. No tool switch, no losing your place on the map.

On a wider screen the panel opens beside the graph; you can grow it to fill the screen for roomier editing and shrink it back when you are done. On a phone it opens as a full-screen sheet so the form has room to breathe, with a clear close button in the top corner.

How relationships change over time

A friendship sours. Allies become rivals. A marriage ends. The Relationship Web records that arc so the graph reflects the right state for any point in your world’s history.

Click an edge to open its detail panel, then find the History section. The current type and intensity sit at the top, with every recorded change listed below it in order.

To log a change, click Record a change and fill in:

• A date label in your own words (“Age 5”, “Year 42”, “T.A. 3018”), so the entry reads the way your world keeps time.
• A sort value, a plain number that orders the change against everything else on the graph.
• The new type and intensity (1 to 5).
• What changed, an optional note for the reason behind it.

You never need a timeline for any of this. A relationship’s history stands on its own, so you can map an entire arc with date labels alone and never open another tool.

Anchor a change to a timeline event

When a change lines up with a moment you already track, link it. The Link to a timeline event dropdown lists your world’s events; pick one and the date label and sort value fill in from it. The change then shows up as a marker on that timeline, so the same beat reads correctly in both tools.

If the moment isn’t an event yet, make it without leaving the panel. Click Create new event, give it a label and a date, and choose which timeline it belongs on. The new event saves, links to the change, and appears in the Time Weaver, all in one step.

If the world has no timeline at all, the same form lets you name a new one right there. It is created with the event, so a writer setting up a world for the first time never has to stop and configure the Time Weaver before recording history. One tool, one flow.

End a relationship

To mark a relationship as over, use Dissolve instead of Record a change. The record is kept; the relationship is flagged as ended at the date you give, and the scrubber draws it greyed out from that point on.

Travel through time with the scrubber

A scrubber sits under the graph at all times. Before you have recorded any history it waits quietly, with a note that recording a relationship change brings it to life, so you always know the feature is there waiting for you. Once a world has dated history, drag the scrubber and the whole web recomputes to show relationships as they stood at that moment: who was allied, who hadn’t met yet, who had already fallen out.

Click Origin to jump to your earliest dated moment or Present to return to now. The tick marks on the rail are the points where something changed, and a small count beside them tells you how many moments you have recorded, so you can read the shape of your world’s history at a glance.

When you want a specific beat rather than a careful drag, use the Jump to a moment picker beside the scrubber. Choose a recorded change by its label and the graph travels straight there. The list is capped so even a heavily tracked world stays readable.

Manage your timeline from here

The scrubber reads its moments off your world’s Time Weaver, so the timeline lives right next to it. The Manage timeline button sits beside the scrubber. Open it and the full event manager comes to you: pick or create a timeline, then add, edit, or remove events with every detail the Time Weaver offers, categories, dates, linked entities, plotlines, and cause-and-effect links. Save and the scrubber updates with the new moments.

This means you can build out a world’s history and its relationship arcs in one sitting, on one screen, without bouncing between tools. The Time Weaver is still there as its own tool with the full canvas view when you want it; this is the same event editing, brought to where you already are.

If the words trip you up, the small info buttons beside Timeline and Events explain what each one is: a timeline is a single chronology your world keeps (you can have more than one), and an event is one dated moment placed on it.

See the whole map

A relationship map gets crowded fast. Use the expand button in the top corner of the graph to blow the canvas up to your whole screen, which is especially welcome on a phone where the map would otherwise be small. A clearly labelled Exit fullscreen button brings you back, and the Escape key works too. You can also pinch or scroll to zoom and drag to pan at any time, in or out of fullscreen.

Show only what you need

A relationship map gets busy. The Display button in the action bar opens a panel beside the graph (a sheet from the bottom of the screen on a phone) that gathers everything shaping the view in one place, so the canvas stays the main thing:

• Entity types and Relationship types. Tick what you want drawn, or use Select all and Clear all. A crowded map calms down fast when you narrow it to, say, just the factions and their rivalries.
• Show tension. Mark the characters pulled between conflicting loyalties, an ally of an enemy, an enemy of a friend.
• Appearance. The canvas theme and colors, covered below.

Close Display to hand the full width back to the graph. Add relationship stays in the bar as the bright button. The quieter actions, Entities, Version history, Re-run layout, Manage types, Export, Print, and Clear, live one tap inside the More menu (the three-dots button in the action bar).

Make the map your own

Appearance sets how the canvas looks. Find it at the foot of the Display panel, or in the More menu.

Pick a canvas theme (Parchment, Blueprint, Midnight, Mono, or Dusk) to retone the whole graph at once: background, lines, node borders, and labels. The same themes carry over to the Time Weaver, so a world reads the same way across both tools.

Below the theme, assign a color to any relationship type and any event category. Built-in types and your own custom ones both work. Colors are saved on the world, so collaborators, and anyone reading a public world or timeline, see the same palette. Reset a single color, or reset everything back to the defaults, from the same panel.

Give an entry a picture in the World Bible and its node wears that art, clipped into the circle, so a face or a place reads at a glance. Entries without a picture keep their type color and show their initials.

Family tree and focus views

The view switcher at the top of the tool has four options. Relationship Web is the full force-directed graph. Family tree follows bloodlines up and down from one character. Focus shows a single relationship type, allies, rivals, mentors, radiating out from a character you choose. Diplomacy maps your factions and how they stand with each other; see below.

The family tree and focus views center on one character at a time. Pick a new one from the Centered on menu, or click a relative on the canvas, and the view recenters. Use Back and Forward, the arrow buttons in the toolbar, to retrace your steps, so following a line three characters deep and returning is one click, not a hunt back through the dropdown.

The family tree pans and zooms like the main graph: drag the canvas to move, use the zoom buttons to get closer, and Fit to view to frame the whole tree again. A wide family no longer runs off the edge with no way to bring it back.

Faction diplomacy

The Diplomacy view answers one question at a glance: which of your factions are at war, which are allied, and everyone in between. It draws only your faction entries and the relationships between them, so the political map of your world stands on its own, separate from the character web.

Give a faction-to-faction relationship a diplomacy score from -100 (at war) to +100 (allied). Add or edit one from the relationship form: when both ends of a relationship are factions, a Diplomacy score slider appears under the intensity. The score is optional. A faction relationship with no score still draws, it just sits at neutral.

In the Diplomacy view, each edge is colored on a ramp from red (at war) through gray (neutral) to green (allied), and the heavier the score either way, the thicker the line. The number rides on the edge, so you can read the whole balance of power without clicking anything. A legend in the corner shows the ramp. Factions that stand warm toward each other on both sides also get a colored ring marking their alliance bloc, so you can see at a glance which powers have drawn together against the rest.

Let the web suggest a score

If you have already drawn the character web, you don’t have to guess a faction’s standing from scratch. When both ends of a relationship are factions, the editor offers Suggest from members: it reads the relationships between the two factions’ member characters, lets allies pull the score up and enemies pull it down, and proposes a number. It’s a starting point, not a verdict, so nothing is written until you accept it, and you can nudge it afterward. Factions with no recorded ties between their people give nothing to derive from, so the suggestion stays quiet.

If you import a world from another tool that scores organization diplomacy, those scores come across onto the matching faction relationships.

Rate each side separately

Real politics is rarely even. One power can court another that quietly despises it. Under the diplomacy slider, turn on Rate each side separately and a second slider appears, so you can score each direction on its own: how the first faction regards the second, and how the second regards the first.

A one-sided standing reads differently on the map. The edge draws dashed, with both numbers on it, and it never joins an alliance bloc, because a bloc only forms where two factions are warm toward each other on both sides. Leave the toggle off and the relationship stays mutual, a single score in both directions.

Watch alliances shift over time

Diplomacy scores travel through time the same way every other relationship does. Record a change on a faction relationship, give it a date, and set the score for that moment. Then drag the scrubber under the graph and watch wars break out and alliances form as you move across your world’s history. A score holds until the next dated change sets a new one, so you only log the moments that actually moved the needle.

A diplomacy map is usually a fixed snapshot. This one has a timeline, so the same two factions can be allies in one era and enemies in the next, and the view shows whichever moment you are looking at.

Share the diplomacy map with readers

When your world is public, the faction diplomacy reads as its own Diplomacy tab on the public world page: a scorecard of which powers are at war and which are allied, on the same red-to-green ramp, asymmetric pairs showing both directions. It appears once you have scored at least one faction-to-faction relationship between factions that are part of the bible. Secret entries never surface here.

Export and print the web

Open the More menu (the three-dots button in the action bar) to take the web out of Inkbreaker. Export as CSV and Export as Excel save a spreadsheet, which is how most writers keep relationship data. The Excel file has two tabs: a Relationships sheet (one row per connection, with the two entities by name, the type, the direction, the intensity, and your notes) and an Entities sheet that lists every entity and its type. The CSV holds the Relationships table.

For a picture of the map, the same menu has Print graph and Download image. Print sends the graph straight to your printer or a PDF, and it is available when the map is small enough to fit a page. For a denser web, filter the entities or relationship types down, or switch to the Focus view, until it fits. Download image saves the graph as a PNG or an SVG and works at any size, so a sprawling map comes out whole.

Clear the whole web

To start a world’s relationships over, open the More menu (the three-dots button in the action bar) and choose Clear all relationships. It removes every edge in the world at once. Your characters, places, and other entries stay exactly where they are, since the web only holds the connections between them.

This is the closest thing the Relationship Web has to deleting it: the web is the set of connections, so clearing them all is how you wipe it. It sits behind the gear and asks you to confirm first, so you cannot clear a map by accident. Every relationship moves to Trash, so you can bring the whole web back from Manage, then Trash, until your plan’s recovery window closes.

Jump to another tool

The worldbuilding tools all read the same world, so moving between them should never mean re-picking where you are. The Tools menu in the header jumps you to any sibling tool, the World Bible, the Time Weaver, the Consistency Sentinel, the Lexicon Engine, or straight to the Entity Types and Relationship Types editors, each opening in a new tab already set to the world you are in. The menu is on every worldbuilding tool, so the trip back is just as quick.

In the editor

The Relationship Web is available inside the writing editor when your piece is assigned to a world. Open it from the tools panel on the right. The panel gives you the quick version: a Focus On picker, the focal entity’s edges, inline note editing, and an Across-time peek, all at the panel’s narrow width.

When you want the real map, click Open full tool (or the Graph link beside the focal entity). The whole Relationship Web slides over your draft as a workspace: the force-directed graph, the family tree, the focus networks, the timeline scrubber, the add and edit forms, entity creation, the history records, and the More menu for clearing the web. It is the same tool you reach from the worldbuilding hub, brought to where you are writing. Your manuscript stays open underneath, and Back to editor in the header returns you to it.

Even the deeper editors come along. Manage entity templates and Manage relationship types (in the Display panel, and beside the type picker when you add a relationship) open the template manager as a subview inside the workspace, so you can add a new relationship type or reshape an entity template and step straight back to the graph.

Nothing opens in a new tab. Anything you change in the workspace, a new relationship, an edited note, a fresh character, a new relationship type, updates the draft’s entity highlighting and the relationship panel right away, with no reload.

What it does not do

The Relationship Web does not invent relationships. If two entries are connected by a templated field (a character’s Allegiance pointing at a faction, say) the edge appears for free. Anything else, you add by hand, and that’s the point. The map is a record of what you’ve decided about your world; it doesn’t try to guess.

See also: Entity Templates, Time Weaver, World Bible.