Frontispiece — The Title Screen, Generated, for RPG Maker MZ

Every RPG Maker MZ game opens on the same screen. A picture, the title in the engine's own font with a black outline, and three centred rows in Kadokawa's Window.png. A player knows what engine your game was made in before they have pressed a single key.

Frontispiece replaces that screen and draws a new one for your game. Not a template you fill in. Not an editor you supply art to. It generates the screen: a ground worked as a real material, a border, a cartouche, and your title cut into it letter by letter from a hand-authored display alphabet.

---

⚠️ 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. FrontispieceRender.js — Frontispiece [1/5] — drawing and colour primitives. Seeded RNG, colour maths, the absolute-separation relief model, deterministic surface noise, path…
2. FrontispieceAlphabet.js — Frontispiece [2/5] — the authored letterform corpus. 79 hand-authored skeletons, five hands, one pen simulation. The wordmark is CUT, not typed.
3. FrontispieceCorpus.js — Frontispiece [3/5] — the corpus. Eight grounds, six frames, six cartouches, twelve ornaments, six vignette constructions, six menu treatments, six…
4. FrontispiecePlate.js — Frontispiece [4/5] — the drawing. Grounds worked as materials, frames, cartouches, ornament and the menu furniture. One fixed light, everywhere.
5. FrontispieceScene.js — Frontispiece [5/5] — replaces Scene_Title with a generated title screen.

This order reads sensibly in the list and nothing depends on it. Every file resolves its siblings the first time it needs them rather than when it loads, so Frontispiece works in whatever order the Plugin Manager gives you. That is tested rather than hoped for: the headless suite, the store-plate renderer, the capture pipeline and the in-engine verification all load the five files alphabetically — which puts FrontispieceAlphabet.js before FrontispieceRender.js, the file it draws with — and require the same objects out of it. All five are needed; FrontispieceScene.js is the only one that touches the engine at all.

Core methods REPLACED — 8 on Scene_Title: Scene_Title.prototype.create, Scene_Title.prototype.start, Scene_Title.prototype.update, Scene_Title.prototype.isBusy, Scene_Title.prototype.commandNewGame, Scene_Title.prototype.commandContinue, Scene_Title.prototype.commandOptions, Scene_Title.prototype.terminate.

That is deliberate and it is what you are buying — but be plain about what it means: Frontispiece will not co-exist with another plugin that also replaces Scene_Title, and whichever loads last wins. The originals ARE saved, so the stock behaviour can be put back at any time. Everything else in your project is untouched.

The lettering is the product

79 hand-authored letterform skeletons, drawn stroke by stroke in the order a hand would draw them, rendered through one broad-nib pen simulation into five hands — 245 glyphs in all.

• Lapidary — Roman inscriptional capital, chisel-cut, with flared serifs
• Uncial — rounded majuscule, broad pen at a shallow angle
• Textura — blackletter, broad pen at forty degrees, no curves anywhere
• Stave — carved with a chisel: straight cuts only, not one curve in the alphabet
• Grotesk — geometric monoline, no serif, wide tracking

Roman capitals, uncials and blackletter are historically the same skeletons written with different tools, so Frontispiece models the tool rather than tracing the result: a nib held at forty degrees produces blackletter contrast because that is what a nib held at forty degrees does. Where the tool is not enough — the uncial E, G, M, N, Q, T and U, the textura A, C, E, G, O, S and U, every round letter in the stave hand — the hand carries its own authored letterforms.

Four cuts, and none of them is a drop shadow

Incised is a V-groove: there is no ink in a carved inscription, only the shadow the cut casts. Raised stands proud and throws its shadow down and right. Inlaid is metal seated in a bed cut all the way round it, with a graded face. Printed is flat ink lying on a surface, and that flatness is the whole difference from an inlay.

Every one of them solves for an absolute luminance separation rather than a multiplier — which is why the same letter reads on pale vellum and on black lacquer.

Six houses, and they are six different screens

A house is a whole visual argument, not a colour scheme: a ground, a border, a cartouche, a hand, a cut, an ornament vocabulary, a device layout and menu furniture, chosen to go together. No two share more than two of those.

• Chancery — a chancery manuscript: ink on prepared skin, ruled and rubricated
• Sanctum — an inscription cut into riven stone under a low pediment
• Folio — a bound folio: gold tooled into grained hide
• Hall — a carved board over a hall door, proud of the oak
• Foundry — etched into a brushed steel plate, seamed and fixed
• Vigil — silver laid into black lacquer, nothing between the letters and the dark

What it reads from your project

Leave House on auto and Frontispiece reads the element, class, weapon and armour names your project uses — but only the ones you have changed, never the ones RPG Maker shipped. That matters more than it sounds: the stock MZ database already contains Axe, Shield, Spear and Ice, so a reading that scored it would hand almost every project the same screen. When your vocabulary says nothing distinctive, it falls back to a stable hash of your game's title — the one field no two games share.

Nothing is random. Frontispiece never calls Math.random, so a given game gets the same title screen every single time it boots.

Everything else on the screen

Eight grounds, each worked rather than tinted — vellum with follicle specks, leather with pores and blind tooling, riven slate that splits in irregular blocks, planished bronze with hammer facets, black lacquer with a specular sweep and hairline crazing, woven linen at a real thread pitch, quartersawn oak with medullary rays, brushed steel with seams and countersunk fixings.

Six borders (fillet, dentil, guilloche, strapwork, cable, corner pieces). Six cartouches (sunk tablet, lozenge, rolled scroll, pediment, banderole, open). Twelve ornaments arranged by six device layouts, with the ornament chosen from your own element names. Six menu treatments — sunk slots, raised plaques, hairline rules, angled tabs, a ruled column with a travelling chevron, or miniature cartouches.

And you can swap any single axis — a different ground, a different border, a different hand — without leaving the house.

The screen can change as the story does

A plugin command changes the house from inside the game, so the screen a player returns to after finishing a chapter need not be the one they started on. The override is one small versioned object on $gameSystem: it saves with the game, an older save simply uses your parameters, and a cold launch always shows your defaults.

What is actually in the box

Five plugin files. No image files, no font files, no dependencies. Every mark on the screen is drawn in code — there is no atlas to lose, nothing to rescale, and nothing that looks different at another resolution.

Performance, measured in the engine rather than estimated. The ground, border, cartouche, wordmark, device and imprint are drawn once into a cached bitmap at scene creation; only the menu is redrawn, and only when the selection actually moves. A settled title screen costs 2 draw calls per frame, 0 texture uploads, 0 windows drawn and no display-object growth across 120 stepped frames.

Being straight with you about two things

Languages. The authored alphabet is Latin capitals, digits and punctuation. A title in Japanese, Cyrillic, Greek or with accented letters cannot be cut from it, and Frontispiece does not pretend otherwise — it letters the title from the house's own display font stack instead, with the same cut, relief and lighting. Still never the engine's face. If your title is not Latin you get a well-lettered title screen; you do not get a cut one.

Compatibility. Frontispiece replaces eight methods on Scene_Title, which is what you are buying — but it means it will not co-exist with another plugin that also replaces Scene_Title, and whichever loads last wins. The originals are saved, so the stock title screen can be put back in one line. Nothing else in your project is touched: no battle, map or menu class, and no per-frame cost anywhere but its own scene.

The rest of the shelf

Frontispiece draws the screen a player sees before the game. These draw the rest of it, the same way — generated, no image files, no atlas:

• Escutcheon — the HUD they look at for the next forty hours: plates, gauges and portrait surrounds as worked metal.
• Patina — every weapon and every piece of armour wears its own history.
• Quires — every book, journal and lore entry in your game binds itself.
• Barrow — every death carves its own marker, lettered and weathered.
• Arras — the playthrough itself, woven into an embroidered frieze.