Relations

What turns a set of records into a world you can navigate.

What a relation is

A typed, directional link between two records: Ana is mentor of Bram; the Silver Order is based in Highgate. The type is yours to define, and the direction means it reads correctly from both ends — open Bram and the same relation says student of.

Why bother

Because the second question is always harder than the first. "Who is Ana?" is answered by her biography. "Who else was at the siege, and which of them knew each other beforehand?" is answered only if the connections are recorded.

A project with relations can answer it. One without has the same information scattered across twenty biographies.

Making them

From either record. Pick the other record, pick the type, and it exists in both places at once — there is no second half to remember to create.

Deleting a record removes its relations rather than leaving them pointing at nothing.

The relations graph

The graph view draws the whole project as a network: records as nodes, relations as edges. It is genuinely useful for two things — spotting a character nobody is connected to, and seeing which character everything runs through.

The graph is 3D and is the heaviest view in the product; it loads only when opened.

Relations and the suggestion panel

An isolated record is one of the things the suggestions look for. A character with no relations is usually either a character you have not finished, or one the story does not need.