Ephemeris — Every Month Prints Its Own Almanac Leaf, for RPG Maker MZ

Your game already has months. It has no idea what they look like.

Ephemeris draws the almanac. Every month your project declares prints its own leaf: a sheet of hand-laid paper with a torn deckle edge, a calendar grid that is drawn rather than tabulated, an engraved device composed from that month's own character, a seasonal colourway, and feast days marked with struck symbols your own game data supplies.

There is no image file anywhere in this plugin. Every mark is drawn at runtime from authored data. A project that invents thirteen months called Frostmoot and Emberwane gets thirteen devices, not twelve stock ones and an apology.

What is actually in it

• 12 engraved month devices — a shoot breaking a frozen crust, ice plates with the water running between them, a nest on a bough, a grazing beast, a gnomon, a bending bough, a scythe over its stalks, a press, a guttering candle, a rimed branch, a kept lantern. Not one is built on a disc, a ring or a radial array, because at the size a device is really seen a sun and a cogwheel are what the eye reaches for first.
• 4 seasons — each with its own paper, ink, rubricated second colour and garland. One of them is the only cold colourway in the set and you can spot it across a room.
• 5 paper stocks — laid wires, chain lines, fibre, a skin's follicle mottle, and a deckle amplitude of its own. Wove declares no wires at all, which is a value and not a missing one.
• 5 rulings — a fine full grid, a thick rule with a thin companion, verticals only, no rules at all with the week held by its end brackets, and a solid head band with the weekday letters reversed out of it.
• 12 struck feast marks — feast, fast, market, moot, rite, muster, harvest, mourning, crowning, birth, omen and quarter day. Two on one day and the higher-ranked wins, so a coronation is never hidden behind a market.
• 8 moon phases, struck on the day the phase begins the way a printed almanac did — not on every day, which would make the sheet a moon chart.
• A drawn alphabet of 40 glyphs. The default font is the loudest "this is RPG Maker" signal there is, so not one character on screen comes from it.

48 distinct leaves before you change a single parameter (12 characters x 4 seasons), and 1,200 settings once the papers and rulings are crossed in.

It reads the calendar you already have — or none at all

Turn it on and run one plugin command. With nothing configured you get a complete twelve-month year that walks every season, every paper and every ruling. Nothing to fill in first.

When you do have a system, there are two routes and both are documented: point three parameters at the variables your date already lives in, or register a calendar in six lines of script. A second plugin command prints exactly which source answered, for the calendar, for today and for the festivals — so when something does not appear, the plugin tells you why in words instead of leaving you guessing.

This listing names no third-party plugin and claims compatibility with none, because we have not run them. The registration contract is the honest version of that promise: it is short, it is documented, and it is what ships.

Your festivals come out of your own database

Put a tag in the note box of any item, weapon, armour, actor, state or troop:

<ephemeris: 8 14 harvest Ingathering>

An item called Harvest Charm can be the festival. A festival can also name a switch, so a coronation appears on the almanac only once it has actually happened.

It is not a calendar system

It does not track time, trigger events or advance days, and it does not want to replace anything. Keep whatever you are using. This is the part nobody sells: the thing the player actually looks at.

How it was tested

There is no human tester on this. It was verified by its own harness: a headless suite of 56 checks over 484 things, a sabotage runner that proves each of those checks really does fail on the defect it names, 38 assertions driving the real MZ runtime, and a fresh-install pass that extracts the zip you download into a blank project and uses it the way you would. Zero windows drawn, zero texture uploads at rest, zero display-object growth through a whole page turn, and nothing written to your save file.

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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. EphemerisCorpus.js — [Ephemeris] The authored corpus - humours, tempers, paper stocks, rule treatments, feast marks and moon phases.
2. EphemerisRender.js — [Ephemeris] The drawing primitives - colour solving, the paper itself, engraved line work, and the pitch-to-count derivation every repeated treatment…
3. EphemerisDevices.js — [Ephemeris] The engraved month devices - one drawing function per humour, plus the wreaths, feast marks and the moon.
4. EphemerisLetters.js — [Ephemeris] The engraved alphabet the leaf is lettered in, and the arithmetic that decides whether letters can exist at a given size at all.
5. EphemerisReading.js — [Ephemeris] The adapter. Reads whatever calendar and festival data the project already has, through four declared routes, and derives a whole year…
6. EphemerisLeaf.js — [Ephemeris] The leaf itself - the sheet, the head, the engraved device and its wreath, the ruled calendar, the struck feast marks and the moon.
7. EphemerisScene.js — [Ephemeris] The almanac scene - the leaf on its board, and the page turn between months. Library file; no parameters. Ephemeris.js opens it.
8. Ephemeris.js — [Ephemeris v1.0.0] Every month your project declares prints its own almanac leaf: paper, deckle, an engraved device drawn from that month's character…

Core methods extended — all 3 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Scene_Boot.prototype.start, Window_MenuCommand.prototype.addOriginalCommands, Scene_Menu.prototype.createCommandWindow.

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

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More from Core Systems Asset Factory: Cartouche · Creel · Colophon · the full catalogue.

AI disclosure: the code and the artwork in this plugin were produced with AI assistance.