I built a relationship map tool

A free browser app for tracking who knows who, who hates who, and who's secretly married.

I've been working on Skromt, an adventure series set in Norway in 1800. It's full of NPCs with overlapping grudges, debts, and secrets. The kind of scenario where the village priest is blackmailing the merchant, who murdered the fisherman, whose draug is now terrorizing the fjord, and the players need to figure all of this out by talking to people who each know a different piece.

I needed a way to see the whole web at once. Index cards on a table worked for a while, but I kept wanting to hide certain connections from my players, and I wanted it on a screen during play.

So I built one. It's at maps.hyperfictive.com.

You create cards for characters and locations, give them names and roles, pick an accent color, upload a portrait if you want. Then you draw connections between them: conflict, alliance, family, secret, info, supernatural. Each type gets its own color and label. The result looks more like a pinboard than a flowchart, which is what I wanted.

The feature I use most is the GM/Player view toggle. You can mark any card or connection as GM-only, and with one click switch to the player view where all of that disappears. I use this during sessions. The players see the map on a shared screen with only the NPCs they've met and the relationships they've uncovered. I see everything.

There's an auto-layout button that arranges the whole graph for you using a constraint solver, then you can drag things around to fine-tune. It also tracks plots and factions, which I started using for Skromt's competing interests (the tussefolk want the mine sealed, the merchant's son needs silver, the bailiff wants taxes, the village is starving).

It works without an account. Everything saves to your browser automatically. If you want to sync across devices, you can sign in with Google or email. You can also export and import JSON, so your data is always portable. There's a sample map loaded with Hundred Acre Wood characters if you want to poke around before committing to your own.

I built this for my own prep, but I think it's useful for anyone running a game with more than a handful of NPCs. Especially for mysteries, political intrigue, or any scenario where the interesting part is how people are connected. Game designers doing NPC-heavy settings might find it handy too.

It's free. I don't know if it'll stay that way forever, but right now it is, and it works.

I'm still adding things. If you try it and something's missing or broken, I'd like to hear about it.