Arras — the playthrough, woven

A hanging that records what your player actually did.

Arras takes the switches your game set, the variables it moved, the victories and the choices, and weaves them into an embroidered frieze in the Bayeux manner. A continuous band of linen that the player can open and scroll, that grows as the game is played, and that is different in every save file because it is made out of that save file.

Nothing in it is shipped art. There is no PNG, no atlas and no sprite sheet in the package. Every figure, every border, every thread and every letter is drawn by the plugin.

What a buyer gets, in one line

Seventy authored entities — 16 figure archetypes, 10 border registers, 10 scene compositions, 6 dye sets, 5 grounds, and a 23-letter alphabet stitched stroke by stroke — assembled into a frieze that is a function of the playthrough and of nothing else.

Three ways to record an act, and you only need one

Watched switches, no scripting at all. List a switch and a line of text in the Plugin Manager. The moment it turns ON, the act is woven. If your project already has switches like "Chapter 3 complete", the work is already done.

Watched variables. The same, on a variable reaching a value.

A plugin command. Arras > Weave an act, from any event.

Leave the scene on choose from the words and Arras reads what you typed. "The oath at Roven" is woven as an oath. "The burning of the mill" as a battle. "Crossing the narrow sea" as a voyage.

The frieze itself

The border tells you what happened before you read a word. Ten decorated registers run above and below the narrative, and the one a panel gets is chosen by the act: plaited interlace for oaths and bargains, confronted wyverns for peril, tillage for labour, fish and eel for anything that happened on water.

The inscription is stitched, not typeset. A Latin formula in the tapestry's own manner, a raised point, and the words you typed:

HIC CECIDERVNT IN PROELIO · THE BVRNING OF THE MILL

It is the classical Latin alphabet — twenty-three letters, no J, U or W — so Arras folds your text the way the tapestries do: J becomes I, U becomes V, W becomes VV. Numbers are Roman numerals. That is not a limitation, it is the look.

Every figure is told apart by its pose and by what it carries, never by its colour, because colour is deliberately arbitrary within a dye set — a horse with two blue legs and two red ones is normal on the real thing. The king is enthroned with a crown and a vertical sceptre. The knight is mounted with a couched lance. The bishop has a cleft mitre and a spiral crozier. The archer is down on one knee behind a bow drawn forward. The healer kneels over the only horizontal figure in the set. Sixteen of them, and no two are the same picture.

Six dye sets, and each changes the linen as well as the wools: Bayeux (the eight historical dyes), Northlands, Harvest, Verdigris, Crownlands and Ashland — a hanging that has been on the wall three hundred years.

The stitch is the product

Every outline is a run of overlapping stem stitches with real sheen and the registration drift of hand-work. Every filled area is laid work crossed by a lattice of couching. The linen underneath is a plain weave with slubs. None of it is a filter laid over vector art — the stitch is the drawing primitive, which is why it holds up when you look closely.

Made to sit beside your other plugins

• Two core methods extended, both by saved-original prototype extension. Nothing is replaced. Arras co-exists with large suites, including VisuStella MZ.
• Order does not matter. Every file resolves what it needs the first time it needs it, and it is tested in the alphabetical order the Plugin Manager gives you.
• Cheap to show. Each panel is stitched once into its own bitmap and afterwards it is a sprite. A forty-act hanging costs the same per frame as a two-act one: measured in the real engine at two draw calls per frame, zero display-object growth.
• No engine chrome and no engine font. Measured on the live display list: zero windows and zero buttons, against a control that reads one window on the title screen.
• Saves are versioned and migrated. A save made today keeps working when Arras is updated, and each act's scene, border and ground are frozen when it is woven — so a future version cannot re-weave a hanging your player already has.

What it does not do

It does not record deaths. That is deliberate, and it is why it sits beside Barrow rather than overlapping it.

Barrow is what was lost. Arras is what was done.

RPG Maker MZ

Six plugin files, raw readable JavaScript, no dependencies. Commercial licence: unlimited games, commercial or free, no royalties.

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⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. ArrasRender.js — Arras — the thread pen. Stitch, laid work, linen ground and the colour rules every other Arras file draws through. No commands of its own.
2. ArrasCorpus.js — Arras — the authored corpus: 16 figures, 10 borders, 10 scene kinds, 6 dye sets, 5 grounds and a 23-letter stitched alphabet.
3. ArrasFigure.js — Arras — draws one worked figure: body, garment, head, attribute, mount and furniture, outlined in stem stitch and filled with laid work.
4. ArrasFrieze.js — Arras — the hanging itself: the stitched inscription, the ten border registers, the five grounds, and the panels they frame.
5. ArrasScene.js — Arras — the scene the player looks at: the hanging on a wall, scrolled left and right. No windows and no buttons, by construction.
6. ArrasBind.js — Arras — reads the playthrough (switches, variables, victories and choices) and binds each act to a woven scene. Plugin commands live here.

Core methods extended — all 2 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Game_Switches.prototype.onChange, Game_Variables.prototype.onChange.

Because nothing is clobbered, Arras co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seams, including large suites.

More from CSAF

More RPG Maker MZ plugins from the same studio:

• Verdict Core - Investigation, Cross-Examination & Deduction for RPG Maker MZ
• Township - NPC Daily Routines & Living Towns, for RPG Maker MZ
• Shipwright
• Quires — every book in your project binds itself

Everything else we make is at csaf.itch.io.