Story map

One graph of a project: the people, places and things of the story as nodes; how they are connected as edges, in three layers you can switch on and off. Open it from the ribbon (the fork icon) or with Open story map.

Not a .canvas

The map is drawn by the plugin as SVG, not as an Obsidian Canvas file. Nothing is written to your vault to draw it; the graph is rebuilt from your notes every time.

The map works in both directions. Push: write, and the map appears from your prose. Pull: start from a blank map — or from a novel you are reading, not writing — and draw the cast and their ties by hand; every node you add is a note, every edge a line in one. See Drawing the map yourself.

What a node is

Kind	Comes from	Default colour
Character	A note with type: character in its front matter, or in a folder named Characters/, People/, Cast/…	blue
Place	type: location / place, or a Places/, Locations/, World/… folder	green
Item	type: item, or Items/ — the rifle, the letter, the truck	yellow
Faction	type: faction, or Factions/, Houses/…	orange
Event	type: event, or Events/	red
Note	Every other note in the project: chapters, scenes. Hidden by default; turn on the Notes kind to see them.	grey
Unnamed (candidate)	A capitalised name that recurs three times in the prose but has no note. Dashed outline.	grey
Outside (reference)	Something a model said the story is echoing — a myth, a historical event, another book. Hollow with a purple ring.	purple

Colours are yours to change in the panel. The full folder and front-matter conventions are in Structuring a project.

Names in prose

Typed notes are found in the text by name, by any aliases: you give them (Obsidian's own property), and by a unique surname or given name — "Marta" resolves to Marta Kovács as long as she is the only Marta. "The Grey Tower" also answers to "Grey Tower". Ambiguous parts ("Kovács" with two Kovácses) do not resolve, on purpose.

Unknown names are collected too: a capital letter mid-sentence is the signal. Capitals after an opening quote, a dash, a bracket or a colon count as sentence starts, ~250 function words and dialogue openers are excluded, and every candidate goes through the part-of-speech tagger, which vetoes pronouns, modals, adverbs, numbers, gerunds and bare adjectives. A name seen mid-sentence anywhere is then recognised at sentence start too. This is why "He", "Can" and "Waiting" never become nodes while "Bear" and "Zsófi" do.

The three layers

Layer	Edges	Where they come from
Links (grey; accent for drawn)	linked — a wikilink one note makes to another; appears — an entity and the chapter it is mentioned in; yours — a relationship you drew on the map or wrote under ## Relationships, solid with a filled arrowhead	metadataCache; the writer's own links and lines
Scenes (accent colour)	N scenes together — two entities mentioned in the same scene, thicker with more shared scenes; labelled relationships the model read ("sister", "owes money to"), dotted with a hollow arrowhead	offline extraction; the model reading
References (grey, dotted)	an entity → an outside reference, labelled with the model's note ("myth: descent with a rule not to look back")	the model reading

A scene is a heading and the prose under it. Every extracted edge carries the scenes that justify it; click the edge to see them and jump to any.

Edges from a model reading whose scene has changed since are drawn dashed (stale) rather than dropped — re-read the note to refresh them.

The map itself

• Pan by dragging the background or with the arrow keys; zoom with the wheel (around the cursor) or + and -; Fit in the head, or f, frames everything. Connect… works from the keyboard too: Tab to the other node and press Enter.
• Nodes settle under a live force simulation and stop moving after a few seconds. Drag a node and its neighbours react; a dragged node stays pinned where you left it, and pinned positions are remembered in Story map.md, so the map opens the same way on the laptop. Unpin in the node's card lets it float again; Shake unpins everything and lets the layout settle, with an Undo in the status line that pins every hand-placed node back where it was.
• Node radius scales with how often the entity is mentioned; edge thickness with how many scenes back it up.
• A labelled edge — a relationship you drew, one the model read, or a reference — shows its word on the line itself, in small italics; click the word or the line for the card. A relationship also has an arrowhead, and reads as a sentence in the arrow's direction: Alice → son → Kevin is Alice's son, Kevin. When each of two notes holds a line about the other, the map draws one line with an arrowhead and a word at each end, each word by the node it leads to; click near an end for that end's card. Lines of different origin between the same pair (man owns horse, the model's horse helps man) bend apart so each can be told from, and clicked, on its own. Label size 0 hides the words, not the arrowheads.
• Bookmarked notes (Obsidian's Bookmarks core plugin) get a ★.
• Click the background or press Esc to deselect. Double-click a node to open its note.

The panel

Every panel of the plugin wears the same shell: a head with the project, a search, one line saying what is shown (14 nodes · 9 shown · 2 filters on, with a Reset), the tools, and jumps to the five sibling panels in a fixed order; and a side column, docked to the right so it never covers the map, folded by the sliders icon in the head. Its state is remembered. When nothing is drawn, the page says which filter is hiding what and offers the click that lifts it.

Section	What
Head	Project dropdown; a search box — matching names stay, with their direct neighbours for context.
Key	In the corner of the map, the kinds on it now, each in its colour.
Head	Add a node; Fit; Shake; Show all when a focus is active; the ⋯ menu, which repeats these and the model reading as rows that name their commands; the jumps to the desk, board, plot grid, threads and manuscript.
Side column	Read project with model (see Reading a project), the one filled button, with its cost beneath; then the folded groups below, each header showing its value. Kinds absent from the project fold into one line.
Filters	Toggle each layer; Hide loners removes nodes with no visible edge.
Kinds & colours	A colour swatch and a toggle per kind, with counts; Reset colours.
Display	Node size, edge thickness, edge opacity, label size (0 hides labels).
Forces	Repulsion, link distance, link strength, centre pull; Reset forces.
Ignored names	Names you marked Not a name, each with Restore.

Everything in the panel persists in the plugin settings and applies to every project.

The card

Click a node or an edge and a card appears beside it, inside the leaf.

A node's card: name, kind (in its colour), aliases, mentions and scene count; then actions —

• Open note (typed notes and chapters);
• Read with model on a chapter node — reads just that note;
• Focus — show only this node and its neighbours (Show all returns);
• Pin / Unpin;
• Connect…, Rename, Delete on note-backed nodes — see Drawing the map yourself;

— then Appears in (each row jumps to the scene's heading) and Connected to (each row selects that edge).

An edge's card: the two names (as buttons that select each node), the summary or relationship label, a stale warning if the scene changed, and the evidence scenes. A relationship you drew has a label field, Relabel and Remove (with an Undo in the status line that writes the line back); a relationship the model read has Write down, which keeps it as one of yours.

Candidates

An unnamed node's card asks What is this? and offers every exit:

Exit	Effect
Character · Place · Item · Faction · Event	Creates a typed note in the project's Characters/, Places/, Items/, Factions/ or Events/ folder (created if missing) with type: and empty aliases:. The node turns solid in that kind's colour.
Alias of…	Pick an existing typed note; the name is added to its aliases. "Marti" folds into Marta; "Tikka" into the rifle note you made a moment ago.
Not a name	Written to the project note as story-ignore: [Name]. The node disappears; Restore in the panel brings it back.

Brands and gear are items, not characters — a rifle in a hunting story carries continuity. A brand that genuinely is a character in your story simply gets a character note; the plugin never decides that for you.

Drawing the map yourself

Nothing on the map is a drawing that lives only on the map. A node you add is a note; a relationship you draw is a line in that note. So the "pull" direction — sketching the schematics of a story before a word of it exists, or reconstructing the web of a novel you are reading — leaves you with a folder of notes you can keep writing in, and syncs like everything else.

Nodes

Double-click the background (or Add in the panel): type a name, pick a kind. A typed note is created in the project's Characters/, Places/, Items/, Factions/ or Events/ folder, exactly as when you promote an unnamed node, and appears under the cursor, pinned.

A blank map is a folder with one note in it saying story: true — no target, no prose, nothing for the writing desk to pace. That is the right project note for a book you are reading rather than writing, too: the map, the model reading, the plot grid and the threads all work on it; the word goal simply never appears.

Rename in the card renames the note; Obsidian updates every link to it, including relationship lines. Delete asks twice, disarms by itself after five seconds, and moves the note to the trash; Undo in the status line writes the note back whole.

Relationships

Connect… in a node's card (or Shift-click a node) starts a line from it; click another node and give the line a label — sister, rival, owes a debt, or nothing. Esc cancels. Both ends must have notes; an unnamed node has to be made into something first.

What gets written is a list line in the first node's note:

## Relationships
- [[Ilse]] — sister
- [[The Guild]] — sworn enemy

Write those lines by hand if you prefer; the map reads them the same way. Wikilinks, markdown links and bare names all work, and so do : and - as separators. The section can be ## Relationships or ## Relations, at any heading level. Lines under other headings are ignored.

The label describes the linked note, as seen from the note holding the line. Read a line as a sentence, this note → label → that note: in Alice's note - [[Kevin]] — son says Alice → son → Kevin, Kevin is her son; in Kevin's note - [[Alice]] — mother says his mother is Alice. On the map the arrowhead points at the note the sentence lands on, and the node card lists the line as → son from Alice's side and ← son from Kevin's. A line that reads the other way round (- [[Kevin]] — wife in Mary Ann's note, meaning she is his wife) shows up as an arrow pointing at the wrong person; write it from the end it describes instead: - [[Mary Ann]] — wife in Kevin's note.

Drawn relationships are in the accent colour, solid, with a filled arrowhead, and always painted on top; the model's are dotted with a hollow arrowhead, so a reading is never mistaken for a line you wrote. The wikilink inside a relationship line is the relationship: a pair with a written line gets no second, grey linked edge for it. Their card says which note holds the line and jumps to it.

When you and the model disagree

You wrote rival; the model, reading the scene, says sister. Neither is thrown away. Both edges turn red — the model's dashed underneath, yours solid on top — and both cards state the disagreement in full: you wrote "rival"; the model read the prose as "sister". From your edge, Use "sister" relabels your line; from the model's, Replace mine with "sister" does the same. Or leave it: the clash is often the interesting part, and it stays visible until you change one side or re-read the scene.

Same label on both sides is agreement and shows no warning. A relationship only one side mentions is not a conflict either.

What is read

Every Markdown note in the project folder except:

• notes with creative-writer: false in their front matter (memos, research, reviews — they talk about the cast in ways that are not scenes);
• typed entity notes, whose prose describes rather than stages (they are nodes, never scenes);
• Story map.md and Story threads.md, the plugin's own data notes.

Prose-less headings (outlines, checklists) are skipped. Notes are read in path order unless they carry story-order (see Front matter). The map refreshes about two seconds after you stop editing.

Sync

Nothing derived is stored — the same notes draw the same map on any machine, and the layout starts deterministically so a story opens the same way everywhere. Relationships you draw are lines in your notes. Only two kinds of thing persist in Story map.md inside the project folder: model readings (the map's, the threads' and the plot grid's), and where you pinned nodes by hand. The note travels with the folder through Obsidian Sync or any other method. See Files & sync.