How do you organise NPC relationships?

Why lists on character pages fail

The default habit is to give each NPC an "allies" and "enemies" list. It breaks for two reasons. First, it duplicates: the same relationship is written on two pages, and after a session where it changes, one of them is wrong. Second, it flattens direction. Loyalty, debt, blackmail and unrequited affection all run one way, and that asymmetry is usually the interesting part.

Storing the relationship as its own thing — a link with a label — fixes both. One record, one place to edit, and the label carries the direction: A owes B, B protects A, A does not know that B reports to C.

What each relationship should record

• Direction From whom, to whom. Reciprocal relationships are two links, not one, and they are frequently unequal — she considers him a friend; he considers her an asset.
• A verb, not a category "Owes a gambling debt to", "informs on", "was pardoned by". Categories like ally or rival tell you nothing you can play.
• Why it exists One clause. The reason is what determines whether the relationship survives pressure.
• Who knows Public, known to the party, or secret. This is the field that most often decides what a scene can be about.
• What would break it Optional, and worth writing for the four or five relationships your plot rests on.

Keep the web small on purpose

The failure mode at the other end is a relationship map with two hundred edges that nobody consults. Relationships are worth recording when they can change, when they are leverage, or when the party can act on them. An NPC's landlord is not a relationship; it is a detail.

A practical ceiling: no more than three or four recorded links per NPC who matters, and none at all for the ones who do not. If a character has fifteen, the page has become a biography rather than a tool.

The other habit worth keeping is drawing a distinction between what is true and what the party believes. Track them separately. Half of what makes relationship-driven play work is the gap between the two, and it disappears the moment you merge the two into one line.

A working relationship record

• It runs in a stated direction between two named people.
• It uses a verb you could put in a sentence at the table.
• It says who knows about it.
• It could plausibly change during the campaign.
• It is stored in one place, not restated on both pages.