Hey, you! Yes, you —do you like charts? What about interactive things? Well, today we have some fancy interactive charts for you! Diplomacy webs are our brand-new feature that will help you see how different organizations relate to each other! This is useful to any worldbuilder, and if your world has a bunch of factions or guilds with complex intrigues, this will be a true lifesaver for you!
The information on this blog post might be outdated! Check the documentation for the most up-to-date information about this feature.
How diplomacy webs work
First of all, you’ll need at least two organizations in your world. Of course, it won’t be a real web if it’s just two of them. But let’s start simple, shall we? “Sure!”, I hear you say. Awesome!
So, you have Faction A and Faction B. Go edit the article about Faction A and click on the Diplomacy tab. Then, click the Add a Diplomatic relation button, and fill in the form! It’s not a long one, don’t worry:
Adding a new diplomatic relation is easy!
Make sure to choose Faction B as the other party! After you’ve filled in and saved the relation, copy the BBCode tag at the bottom of this page and copy it anywhere. And that’s it! This is how the web we created would look:
Yeah… it’s a pretty simple “web” for now, isn’t it?
Pretty boring, huh? Well, just keep adding diplomatic relations for each of your organizations! You’ll end up with a very complex but very shiny interactive web! And if you use tags for your organization articles, you can display a full web with relations between all tagged organizations! Just use the tag in the diplomacy code. For example, [diplomacy:#evil_factions] will generate a web with all organizations tagged with the #evil_factions tag. This is how a full diplomacy web could look like:
Now that’s a real web!
Diplomacy webs are a Guild feature —so make sure you have a membership of Master (or above) if you want to use them! For more details on how to use diplomacy webs, check out the Codex guide!
Tips to use them in your worlds
Worlds with lots of different factions are complex and can be difficult to understand for your readers or players. Visual content always helps, and diplomacy webs are no exception! And of course, it will also help you keep your worldbuilding more consistent.
If you have an introduction article to your world (and I recommend you create one if you haven’t!) you can add a web with all the relevant factions in there. This could be especially important if your world is for an RPG and your players can join these factions! Knowing who your friends and enemies are is always a good idea, right? And if your world is for a writing project, use the diplomacy web to give your readers an overview of your world’s structure!
So, how do you like this new feature? Are you using it? Show me your diplomacy webs in the comments! So excited to see what the community does with this!
I’m already really enjoying this feature! It’s a little bit of an off-brand use, but I find it’s not only good for showing relations between nations and organizations in general, but also useful for showing the connections between other groups that use the Organization template, such as religions: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/manifold-sky-bcgrwurth/a/on-religion-and-philosophy-article
Sorry for double-posting, but I was wondering if there were plans to give us some control over the layout of these webs? I feel like it would be aesthetically pleasing to put opposed factions on opposite ends of the chart from one another or group allied factions closer together.
Can you add this feature to settlements? My RPG world has both groups and towns as factions so it would be great to be able to use this.
Hey Clint, the way settlements are set in World Anvil by definition they cannot have relationships. The reason being that they are locations that people inhabit, not the people themselves.
From a worldbuilding standpoint a city does not have bad relations with another – the people that run it do.
The way to work with this as with countries is to create a ruling council / senate / mayorship for your settlement as an organization which OWNS the city and use those organizations to create a relationship web
I understand the logic but I also think this feature should be available for other articles not only for organisations. As the buddy above I do not have organisations but Ethnicities. My world is not as organised yet, most of people use Polis system, while some are a wild race (they function rather as an ethinicity) and some still struggle with their independence – so they can have different relationships with the rest of the world. And still, this feature can be really creative, I think it shouldn’t be that limited. Personally I can’t use this for now, unless I wanna duplicate my articles or make dummy pages just to have this tree.
This is great! But where did you add the images? Trying to find a place where I put that tag that makes it show up like the examples….
The images are the crests/flags of your organizations. You can add this on the top right of your Organization’s edit screen 🙂
This is a great addition to the tools available. If you could tag NPCs to a universal list of contacts in this way, then a GM could click on the “portrait” of the NPC and pull-up a full diagram of their relationships to other NPCs. These NPCs could include tags for nationality or other “affiliations” that could help a GM run a game. And if the players could also build their contacts then they might well begin to desire to participate in RP more to develop their contacts.
Is there a way to get more than just 2 relationships? I need way more than that. In any world the powerful families would have hot/cold relationships with others. I don’t mean general level but one family could have a dozen alliances.
Thank you so much for your kind words! We aim to give snackable, stealable inspiration to lift people up 😊!