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Chapter II · Section 2

Knowledge Graphs: Drawn from Your Database

You do not draw graphs in Grimoire. Fill in alliances, parent locations, and session recaps, and the political web, geography, and timeline draw themselves.

Most tools make you build relationship maps by hand and watch them go stale. Grimoire inverts that: the graphs are projections of your database, so they are as current as your records. This page walks each graph and the exact fields that feed it.

Everything lives at Knowledge → Graphs (sidebar Graphs), a workspace with a tab rail: World Foundations first, then Political Web, Timeline, and Geography, then any graphs you create yourself, and + New graph at the end.

The Political Web

Who is allied with whom, who is feuding, and where every NPC's loyalty sits.

Alliance, rivalry, and membership fields in the database become the edges of the Political Web graph. What you fill in Silver Hand Allies: Merchant Guild Merchant Guild Rivals: Crimson Pact Thrain (NPC) Faction: Silver Hand Faction and NPC records What the Political Web draws Silver Hand Merchant Guild Crimson Pact Thrain
Three ordinary database edits on the left; the map they produce on the right.

To put an edge on this map, edit the records at either end of it:

  1. Open a faction and add another faction under Allies or Rivals. That single edit draws an alliance or rivalry edge.
  2. Open an NPC and set their Faction. That draws a membership edge and pulls the NPC into the web.
  3. Relationships between individual characters (rival captains, old flames, sworn enemies) edge the web too, from the Relationships field on either NPC.
  4. A faction's leader and an NPC's superior draw edges as well, so the chain of command shows up without extra work. Leader edges are drawn in gold.

A faction with no allies, no rivals, and no members floats alone, which is itself useful: an unconnected node on this map is a faction you have not yet made matter.

Which entities appear is set in the graph's settings under Entity Population Mode. Auto, the default, places entities on the graph as your relationships and session recaps reference them. Manual shows only the entities you add yourself.

The Timeline

Your table's history, session by session.

Logged sessions become columns of cards on the Timeline, with an open thread running as a lane between the sessions it touched. Session 4 Session 5 Session 6 Ambush at Millbrook 3 NPCs · 1 location Revelation The road north 2 NPCs · 1 item Highlight The Queen's audience 4 NPCs · 2 locations State change Thread: Missing shipments started progressed resolved Log a session and it takes its place. No extra setup.
Each logged session becomes a column. Threads run as lanes between the sessions that touched them.

The Timeline is a braid of your sessions: one column per session, ordered by session number and then by date.

  • Each session card shows the NPCs, locations, quests, and items its recap links, and is colored by the session's observations (see Running Sessions).
  • Open threads run as lanes between the sessions where they started, progressed, and resolved. Show or hide them with the thread lanes button in the toolbar.
  • Story arcs you create span the sessions they cover.
  • Session detail in the toolbar switches to fuller cards. Your choice is remembered in this browser.

To follow one character or place through the campaign, use Trace entity: pick an NPC, location, quest, or item and every session it appears in lights up. Clicking the entity counts on a session card is a shortcut. Clear trail, or Esc, resets the view.

The Open Threads panel sorts threads into All, Major, Minor, and Resolved tabs.

If your Timeline is empty, no sessions are logged yet. The fix is never on the graph: log a session and it appears.

Geography

Where everything is: continent holds region, region holds city, city holds tavern.

Parent Location fields on location records become places drawn inside their parents in the Geography Nested view. What you fill in Highvale parent: The Sundered Reach Millbrook parent: Highvale Broken Crown Tavern parent: Millbrook Location records with a Parent Location What Geography draws The Sundered Reach Highvale Millbrook Broken Crown Tavern
One field, Parent Location, builds the whole map of places. Nested view shown.

Geography is built from each location's Parent Location. Set it as you create places and the view assembles itself.

The toolbar has two choices:

  • Layout: Nested draws places inside their parents, boxes within boxes. Tree draws a tidy family tree.
  • Density: Compact or Detail.

Places with no parent sit in the Unplaced band along the bottom, marked "Not inside any place yet", so a quick look shows you exactly which places you have left floating.

Maps are optional. Open a place and choose Add a map to upload an image, then Open map to pin places and people onto it. Pinning a place that has no parent puts it inside that location for you. Pinning one that already has a parent asks Move this place?: choose Move it to change its parent, or Just pin it to leave the hierarchy alone.

The Locations page no longer has its own tree view; Geography replaces it.

World Foundations

The one graph you author directly. Foundations holds the deep canon that is not really a "record": your creation myth, the cosmological order, the ancient pact that explains everything. You create foundation nodes and connect them by hand, and the result reads as a map of what is fundamentally true in your world. It sits first in the tab rail because everything else rests on it.

Graphs you define yourself

+ New graph at the end of the tab rail creates a custom graph:

  1. Name it and choose which categories it can contain (a heist graph might take NPCs, locations, and items).
  2. Add records from the graph canvas itself: the add button searches your world without leaving the view.
  3. Connect any two nodes and name the connection. Custom edges are yours; they do not have to correspond to a database field.

Custom graphs are the right tool for one-off structures: a conspiracy board, a tournament bracket, a web of debts.

Reading a graph

On the Political Web and graphs you define yourself, the toolbar gives you:

  • 2D or 3D rendering, whichever reads better for the layout
  • A center node and a depth (All Depths, or Depth: 1 to Depth: 4) to see just one entity's neighborhood
  • A relation filter (All Relations by default) to isolate, say, only rivalries
  • AI Context to show only the entities currently in AI context
  • Nodes and Edges checkboxes to show or hide labels
  • Fit to re-center when you get lost

Click any node to open its detail panel: summary, connections, and a jump to the full record. The Timeline and Geography have their own controls, described above.

Each graph can also be included in your campaign's AI context; the AI Context guide covers that switch.

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