2026-03-15
PLOT
Desperate to marry Ileana, whose parents demand he lift the supernatural blight destroying their ancestral lands, Vahe accepts a bone amulet from the enigmatic Beatriz, wife of a wealthy occultist. She promises it will grant him success in breaking the curse. As Vahe delves deeper into forbidden rituals, he discovers the amulet’s power stems from binding his soul to Beatriz’s dark patron. Though he succeeds in cleansing the land, the victory is hollow—the amulet’s price is his sanity, leaving him a broken man who can never truly possess the love he fought so hard to win.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Person Subjected to Adverse Conditions
- Action
- Engaging in a difficult enterprise when promised a reward for high achievement
- Outcome
- Pays a grim penalty in an unfortunate undertaking.
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#110
Love’s Misadventures
The protagonist, in love with the love interest, is promised their hand in marriage if the protagonist will: successfully accomplish a work of great difficulty; demonstrate their ability by securing a position at a salary which the love interest's parents think necessary for the love interest's comfort and happiness; or solve a puzzling mystery.
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#1377b
Mystery
The co-protagonist, in order to help the protagonist achieve success, gives them a mysterious little object, X, which they solemnly assure them will make them successful in all their undertakings.
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#1075b
Personal Limitations
The protagonist's admiration for their friend, the co-protagonist, and their desire to please them, inspires the protagonist to bring out the best in their nature.
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#844a
Helpfulness
The co-protagonist, an attractive married person, clever and influential, seeks diversion by helping their friend, the protagonist.
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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 to follow along this little adventure, subscribe to the weekly email.
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.