Imposed Hooks
Most Hooks are yours from the first scene - things you chose, personal drives you built the character around - but the world pushes back, and now and then it pushes a Hook into you. A curse, a slow poison, a spell of terror or fascination, a spirit's patient whisper… while most Harm that takes your agency rather than your health would usually land as a Hindrance, some, especially compulsions, will more likely be an Imposed Hook: a forced condition that behaves like a Hook, because it is one… just not one you chose.
What It Is
An Imposed Hook is a real Hook in every way but one. It has a rank, it matters in some situations and not others, and it counts against you. Others may exploit it. The frightened soldier is easier to rout, the charmed courtier easier to fool, the addict easier to bait. Someone has added a lever on you and the handle points the wrong way.
The single difference from an ordinary Hook: an Imposed Hook earns you no Karma. It is not yet yours; it was done to you, and the game does not pay you for being a victim.
Not yet. Karma is earned.
Imposing Is Not Commanding
Winning the roll that imposes a Hook is not the same as making you act on it. When a mage's "Drop Your Sword!" overwhelms your attack, the magic has thwarted that one swing - the psychic wave washed over you and the blow never landed, but the sword is still in your hand. Prying it loose is a separate action, and you still have the option to resist or oppose it like any other. The mage has laid the glamour on you, but now he must invoke it, and that means the rolling of dice, ratings against ratings; he just gets to add the Hook's rank when it applies.
Would it make more sense to have imposed the Harm as a Hindrance to resisting his commands? Well, yeah, sure, but sometimes a Hook is the right tool. When, you ask? It depends. We'll get back to that. For now, this example is simple, and fun.
Adopting the Baby
Here is the door, and it only opens from your side.
Imposed Hooks provide no Karma (or Luck Tokens, but I'll skip that for now so we don't have to keep saying it.) Resisting any Hook provides no Karma.
The moment you stop merely suffering an Imposed Hook and use it, leaning into it because it is, now, a thing your character would do, you can get that awesome supply of sweet Karma (and yes, ok, Luck Tokens) on demand by self-hooking on it like any normal Hook. The instant you do, it's yours. Adopted. Promoted to a full Hook: tap its bonus, rank it up, grind it down. It's now honestly a part of who you are. Take the Karma, and you have adopted it.
Full stop.
Feign compliance with a charm to get close to the enchanter, tell yourself it was a ruse, but you fed it to do so and took the Karma. The compulsion was steering, if only a little. An enchanter who trusts a mind he beguiled this way is a fool, but when you turn on him that Hook sits on his side of the roll, dragging at the hand, slowing the strike meant to end him.
Kill him anyway? Good job! The Hook does not simply vanish.
Now It's Yours
An adopted Hook is a living thing, and it's yours now. It may still be renamed as it grows or diminishes. Maybe it isn't Charmed any longer, but Grief and Remorse: the same Hook, internalized, reminding you what you did. You can refuse the Karma and try to grind it away, or keep it and earn from carrying the weight, even feed it and let it deepen. Your Hooks are a record of what the world has done to you and how you made it your own, and adopted Hooks are exactly where those meet.
Getting Rid of It
You are never required to adopt anything. An Imposed Hook you refuse - decline the Karma, resist it when it rises, act against it wherever you can - behaves like any unfed Hook: it lets you degrade it by a rank each session it was triggered and resisted, and may be renamed as it fades. Must Keep It Secret dwindles to Habit of Silence, to Socially Distant, to nothing at all.
This is convalescence, not a cure-all. It costs real sessions of refusing what is easy, but the door out is always open.
This is also how a Conjuror sheds a Soulburn that has set into an Imposed Hook, and how many lasting curses, addictions, and fears can be overcome.
A Worked Example - "Drop Your Sword"
The mage's glamour lands and you take Drop Your Sword as an Imposed Hook. His win thwarts your attack - the compulsion drowns it - but the blade stays in your grip.
Next turn he repeats the command, and this time he adds the Hook's rank to his roll: the imposed compulsion activated. You could resist again, and if you succeed the sword is yours for the round… but you've seen his mistake. You choose to open your hand, call it self-hooking, and pocket the "free" Karma. Before the blade rings on the stones you step in and put your gauntlet in his teeth.
The Karma was a gift you gave yourself. You walk away owning a brand-new, faintly ridiculous, entirely genuine Hook: Drop Your Sword. Now every time you find yourself in need of a long blade the GM grins and picks up a Karma token to tempt you, and you are becoming known for the dramatic self-disarm and the sucker punch that follows. The world handed you a compulsion; you turned it into a bit.
That is the whole engine in one exchange: the world compels you, you seize the wheel, and the compulsion becomes character.
See also: Agnes Under a Bushel in the bestiary, whose entire method is a slow-grown Imposed Hook the bearer is seduced, one small reward at a time, into adopting as their own.