A Secret is an arc, not a fact. Here's how Secrets, Clues, Scenes, and Locations connect so the party can actually uncover the arc no matter which door they open.
You spent four hours prepping the cult angle. You wrote a Clue about the burned letter on the Alderman's desk, another about the rumour at the harbour bar, a carved symbol on the lighthouse wall. The party went to the Alderman's house, missed the letter, talked to the wrong neighbour, and went home convinced the whole story was about the lighthouse.
The discovery graph is what makes that night recoverable.
The first thing to get straight: a Secret in Wyrdli isn't one hidden fact. "The cannery is the cult's safehouse" isn't a Secret, it's a Clue. A Secret is the whole arc the party is uncovering, a multi-faceted hidden truth with a title, a description, and several threads running through it.
That's one Secret. It's bigger than one fact, smaller than the whole Campaign. Most Wyrdli Campaigns run several Secrets across their life: one resolves, a new one takes its place, the cast carries forward.
A Clue is the thing the party finds that opens a door into the Secret. Not the realisation that follows from it, the evidence itself: the burned letter, the apothecary's complaint about lamp oil, the sick child seen on the cannery road at the wrong hour.
The surprising part of Wyrdli's model is that a Clue isn't a thing parked on a shelf, it's a connection. A Clue lives at a Location (or two), it points at a Secret, and it leads the party from where they are to somewhere they should go next. The burned letter doesn't just sit on the Alderman's desk; it leads from the Alderman's house to the cannery basement.
One Clue can sit at more than one Location, and it can point at more than one Secret. You don't need a separate Clue for every investigator who might find it; you need one Clue that's findable from several angles.
A Location is a place where Clues live. A town, a building, a single room. Locations nest, so the harbour bar inside the docks district inside the town is exactly three Locations layered the way the map is.
A Scene is the move that's specific to Wyrdli: a Clue you've placed is sealed in prep until a Scene activates it. The burned letter exists in your notes from the day you wrote it, but the party can't find it until the Scene "Searching the Alderman's house" gets played. Activation is how you control when the party can advance, without metagaming the dice and without faking inspiration on the fly.
If a Secret has only one Clue, in one Location, gated behind one Scene, the whole arc is one missed roll away from collapsing. The witness isn't home. The library Scene runs out of time. The party never opens the cupboard. The arc just stops, and you sit there improvising for forty minutes.
Wyrdli doesn't fix this for you. It makes the shape visible, so the moment you've written a single-thread Secret becomes obvious in prep, not three hours into the session.
Now the party has three independent ways into the Innsmouth Cannery arc. Any one of them gets them there. Two can fail and the arc still moves. That redundancy is the whole game.
The Canvas shows the graph as a picture: Locations as places on screen, Clues as lines between them, Scenes pinned to the Locations where they activate. The Play view is where the Scenes actually get dropped during the session.
Wyrdli nudges you toward writing more Clues than feels necessary and more paths than feels elegant, because at the table, redundancy is what survives the chaos.
