See your cast as a network,
not a list of names.

Include every relationship that does work in the story, and leave out the rest. Blood and marriage, alliances and rivalries, debts and obligations, romance in every state of repair, and secrets, meaning who knows what about whom, are the usual load-bearing types. A useful test for any edge is whether it will change: a relationship that is identical in the last chapter and the first is scenery, not story. Many writers also mark direction, since a debt runs one way and unrequited feelings famously do too. Resist mapping every acquaintance; a map of forty trivial edges hides the six that matter, and the point of the exercise is to see those six clearly.

Plotting and relationship mapping are different jobs, so be clear which one you are shopping for. For plot, meaning scenes in sequence, Plottr is purpose-built for novel timelines and does that job very well, and Scrivener is the pick if you want the outline and the manuscript in one long-term project. Storyflow's own plotting surface is covered on the novel plot creator page: scene cards on a spine with subplot tracks beneath. This page is about the cast side, characters as a network of labeled relationships. The practical advantage of Storyflow is that both live on the same infinite canvas, so the plot and the relationship map that has to explain it sit side by side instead of in two apps.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan for solo use launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so a co-writer or your gaming group can view and contribute without paying. If you need a free option this minute, Obsidian's Canvas is genuinely free for local use and handles a basic character web well, and index cards with string on a corkboard remain a perfectly serious tool for a first pass at a small cast.

No, and it is not built to. Storyflow's AI does structural work: describe your cast and it lays out profile cards and the connections you named, so you start from a drawn network instead of a blank canvas. From there you can ask it questions the board can answer, which characters never interact, where a faction is only connected through one person, what a missing edge between two characters could plausibly be. Because it uses your whole board as context, the answers are about your story rather than a generic one. Who these people are, what they want, and what they hide stays your call, which is the only arrangement that produces a cast worth reading.

Map the network more than once. Make a section of the canvas for act one and another for act three, or one per book in a series, and draw the cast in each. The differences between the two maps are the story's actual movement: trust built, alliances broken, secrets surfaced, debts paid. This also doubles as a diagnostic. If the act one map and the act three map are nearly identical, the plot has been happening to the cast rather than between them. And if a relationship reverses between sections with no scene accounting for the change, you have found a gap before a reader finds it.

On paper, somewhere around a dozen characters the lines start crossing into spaghetti, which is exactly when a map matters most. On an infinite canvas the practical answer is much higher, because you can use space instead of cramming: give each faction its own cluster with internal edges drawn inside it, and only draw the cross-faction edges that carry story weight between clusters. For very large casts, series regulars plus one-book characters for instance, keep a master map of the principals and satellite sections per book or arc. The skill is curation. Map the load-bearing relationships prominently and let trivia stay in the profile cards.

Yes, both are natural fits because both are long-running networks that outgrow memory. For a campaign, map NPCs, factions, and party ties, and keep the secret edges, the spy's true employer, the debt the patron has not mentioned, on a GM-only board while sharing a view-only player map of what the table has learned. For a series bible, the relationship map per book or per season becomes the continuity backbone: who was allied when, which feud had started by which chapter. Export any map as an image or PDF to drop into an existing bible document, or keep the whole bible on the canvas with the maps beside the lore.

Yes, and it changes how the map reads. Each node can be a full profile card, backstory, want, wound, voice notes, rather than just a name, so the map doubles as the cast's home. Drag in reference images to give every character a face; a network of faces is legible at a glance in a way a network of names never is. Moodboards for a faction's aesthetic or the story's atmosphere sit on the same canvas, as can research PDFs, links, and frames grabbed from YouTube or Vimeo for costume or performance reference. The point is one surface: the people, the connections between them, and the material that informs both.

Yes. Send a view-only link and anyone can open the full map in a browser without an account, which makes cast-level feedback concrete: a critique partner can point at the edge they do not believe, or the character connected to the plot through only one person. If you want people contributing rather than just looking, invite them onto the canvas, and a writers' room or co-authored series works from one shared network with comments attached to the cards they concern. You can also export the map as a high-quality image or PDF for anyone who prefers something to print and mark up.