2026-06-20
TODAY’S PLOT
Tsering, a surveyor obsessed with cartographic anomalies, tracks whispers of a mirror that erases what it reflects deep into the Karakoram range. Three days in, their instruments spin backward and the trails fold into themselves. Lost, starving, they stumble into a settlement that answers to no government—a place where outsiders are buried in salt. The elders prepare Tsering for execution until Fadumo, the magistrate’s daughter, intervenes. She has dreamed of Tsering’s arrival for months, visions the village calls blasphemy. Fadumo risks exile to free them, and together they locate the mirror in a glacial cave. It shows Tsering a future where they vanish entirely. Fadumo sees herself alone, grieving. They shatter it anyway. The valley opens. Whether curse or benediction, neither can say.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Person in Love
- Action
- Becoming involved in a puzzling complication that has to do with an object possessing mysterious powers
- Outcome
- Meets any fate, good or evil.
-
#1379
Mystery
The protagonist is a person of adventurous nature who seeks to accomplish a dangerous enterprise. The protagonist, hearing of a mysterious and dangerous object, X, in a canyon of the lonely mountains, decides to investigate.
-
#691
Misfortune
The protagonist, an explorer, loses their way in a trackless wilderness.
-
#689
Misfortune
The protagonist is traveling through a remote, unexplored wilderness. The protagonist, traveling through a remote, unexplored wilderness, is captured by a hostile community and threatened with death.
-
#331
Love’s Rejection
The love interest, from a different cultural background, challenges social conventions by falling in love with the protagonist.
Hello, what is this?
Plottomatic is a daily plot machine designed to demonstrate a new and modernized version of Plotto, William Wallace Cook’s 1928 book and system for generating plots.
What's Plotto and why a modernized version?
William Wallace Cook was a prolific writer who created a strange and ingenious system for building plots: Plotto. I rewrote the manuscript to remove the antiquated 1928 discriminatory language while preserving the original structure and logic.
More info on making this: Plottomatic: rewriting a 1928 plot machine .
How does Plottomatic work?
Plottomatic walks through this new version of Plotto and chooses a protagonist, an action, and an outcome. Then it builds a series of dramatic situations that are chosen using the original Cook logic. Finally, it transforms the finished plot structure into a readable synopsis that adds characters, theme, and setting. That’s the daily plot you see above.
Are you making a new book or an app?
I’m glad you asked! Not yet – but wouldn't that be great? If you want more info, check out the project page and say hello.
Acknowledgements
William Wallace Cook wrote Plotto in 1928.
Gary Kacmarcik digitized the original book and created the original and foundational hyperlinked edition.
David Eyk created an XML version using Gary’s work and fixed some cross-reference links. I used this as the source file.
Pankaj Agarwal built a Flutter implementation that helped me shape the data model.
Lynn Cherny wrote an in-depth analysis of Plotto in 2018 that quantified the gender and race issues as well as other structural problems.