[plot description by original author]
The Hook, Line and Sinker format appeared in SHADIS magazine:Hook: The current location or situation of the party.
Line: The situation which introduces the side-adventure.
Sinker: The twist, or what is unknown to the party, and the result.
HOOK: This HLS [i.e. Hook, Line and Sinker presentation]
is for the time-travel genre; the PCs are time agents out to
foil the attempts of rebel time-travellers to alter history.
LINE: On one of their missions (the particular time and story do not matter), they gather clues to unmask the rebel organization. They do well up to a certain point, but then they start to fail miserably. Rebel agents constantly elude them, their elaborate traps and attempts to rectify time become useless. It is almost as if all their actions were anticipated.
SINKER: The turning point happened when one of the rebels, a former time agent bribed or coerced into working for the rebels, suddenly recognized one of the PC time agents as a younger version of herself, complete with half- remembered incidents in the chase and how the time-agents failed every time. The game master should allow this pathetic anticipation of events by the rebels to continue, up until the point where the PCs realize that one of the rebels is an older version of their female colleague! If they return to the central offices of the time agency, the moment they ask for a sustained surveillance of their female member for the next few years, a time shift will occur. The female agent will have no memory of the mission (although the other PCs will), and in the coming years a different team of agents will identify an attempt to coerce the agent and will then infiltrate and destroy that particular organization of rebels. The disadvantage is that the time agency will have no memory of a problem which cancelled itself, and so agents won't receive any pay.