2026-11-06
TODAY’S PLOT
Rigoberto Salcedo, fever-sick and penniless, takes cash and soup from Mirjam Kask, who whispers her secret: she runs liquor through the docks. When Lieutenant Haddad arrests Rigoberto on suspicion, he demands Mirjam’s routes and contacts. Rigoberto refuses to break confidence, enduring interrogation in a cement cell. But Haddad knows Rigoberto’s weakness—Thierry Beaumont, the dock foreman both Rigoberto and Colonel Vasconcelos desire. Vasconcelos, Rigoberto’s commanding officer, offers a devil’s bargain: vanish from Thierry’s life, or face execution for protecting a criminal. Rigoberto chooses silence over betrayal, loyalty over love. He dies in custody, clutching the only currency that mattered—his word.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Normal Person
- Action
- Being delivered from misfortune by one who, in confidence, confesses a secret of transgression
- Outcome
- Emerges from a trying ordeal with sorely garnered wisdom.
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#831
Helpfulness
The protagonist, ill and starving, receives food and money from their ally. The ally tells the protagonist in confidence that they are a bootlegger.
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#824
Helpfulness
The protagonist is a prisoner of the officer of the law, and the officer of the law seeks to secure from the protagonist information inimical to the co-protagonist.
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#943b
Idealism
The protagonist, a prisoner, dies holding fast to a lofty conception of duty rather than win freedom by shattering their ideals of loyalty.
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#136
Love’s Misadventures
The protagonist and the rival are in love with the love interest. Obliged to carry out the orders of the rival, the protagonist is commanded to commit suicide, or to leave the field clear for the rival.
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.