Who’s tied to whom.At every chapter.

Why a fixed relationship chart lies

Most relationship maps are drawn once: a chart with arrows saying who loves, hates or serves whom. The trouble is that a story is the process of those arrows changing. In chapter three the knight is loyal to the queen. In chapter twenty he is plotting against her. A chart that shows both arrows at once tells you nothing about either chapter, and a chart that shows only the latest one spoils the first half of your own book for you while you revise it.

The question a writer actually asks is narrower: who does she trust right now, in this scene? Who knows that these two are siblings yet? Which of the two families is still at war when the wedding happens? Those are questions about a moment in the story, and the map has to be able to answer for a moment.

That is the idea behind Connections. Every tie carries the chapter it begins in and the chapter it ends in, so the web can be drawn as of any point in the book.

The kinds of tie a story runs on

Ties in Authrot are sorted into a short list of types so the web can colour and filter them: family, romance, friends and allies, rivals and enemies, mentor, belongs to (member of, serves, rules), place (lives in, comes from), has (owns, carries, wields), events (took part in, witnessed, survived) and other. Each also keeps its own words, like “owes a debt to” or “swore to kill”, because the label is yours, not the software’s.

Some ties run the same both ways: married to, allies with. Those are marked mutual and drawn as one line. Others don’t: a sister of someone isn’t their sister back if he is her brother, and a man who adores a woman who barely knows his name is not in a mutual romance. An arrow shows which way a one-way tie points, which matters for every unrequited love and every one-sided feud in your book.

Ties aren’t only between people. A character’s ties to the faction they serve, the city they come from, the sword they carry and the battle they survived show on the same web, so you can see the story’s whole structure of loyalties, not just its friendships.

• Filter the web by kind of entry and by type of tie, or show only one
• “Often together” adds a faint line between characters who share chapters
• Pan and zoom, spread the web out, and click any line for every tie between that pair
• Large casts show the main characters first, with everything one click away

Slide to any chapter

The slider over the web runs across your chapters. Drag it back to chapter five and you see only the ties that hold by chapter five: the betrayal in chapter nineteen hasn’t happened yet, the secret parentage isn’t on the page yet, the alliance is still intact. Ended ties fade rather than vanish, so you can see what was and no longer is.

This is the view to open before writing a scene with several people in it. It answers who is speaking to whom, and on what terms, at exactly that point in the book. In a series, where a reader might be starting book three having forgotten the details of book one, it is also how you check that the recap you are writing is true to what came before.

On a character’s own page, Connections over time shows the same thing as a timeline: one row per person or place they are tied to, a bar for each tie from where it begins to where it ends. When one tie ends in the chapter where another begins between the same two (trusts, then distrusts), the two are joined, so you see the turn.

Found in the text, corrected by you

Building a relationship map by hand for a big cast is slow, and it falls behind the book. When a chapter is read into the bible, Authrot looks for the ties it shows or reveals: a new rivalry, a family bond mentioned for the first time, a servant and the one she serves. Each tie is kept with the passage it came from, and a tie between two people is kept only when the passage actually shows both of them.

No reading is perfect, so every tie shows where it came from and links to the passage. A wrong one is one click from corrected or removed, and the type of any tie can be changed. You can also add ties by hand on any entry page, which costs nothing and works with the AI switched off. Many writers do both: let the readings find the obvious ties, then add by hand the ones only they know, like the debt nobody has mentioned yet.

Romance, politics and found family

Different stories lean on different kinds of tie. A romance is a single tie changing type over a whole book, from rivals to allies to something more, and the timeline view shows that arc as plainly as a plot outline would. A political fantasy is dozens of ties of belonging and enmity, and the web filtered to factions shows where power sits at any chapter. A found-family story is a slow thickening of the web around one character, which the around-one view shows almost literally.

If you are unsure which way a relationship should go, write both. A branch from the chapter where it turns lets you try the other pairing or the other betrayal, with the bible and its ties on that branch kept to what happened there. Merge back the version you choose, or keep both.