Hallmark - Procedural Item Marks & Maker’s Punch Generator for RPG Maker MZ

In stock RPG Maker, a legendary blade and a starter dagger are the same picture — a 32×32 tile from an iconset that ships with every project ever made. Your loot system can roll a hundred variations and the player still sees the same sword, over and over, down the whole list.

Hallmark replaces that tile with a struck mark, composed from the item's own properties. Keep your loot system. This is the part that makes the drop look like something.

2,688 marks, and not one image file

Every mark is drawn as vector geometry at whatever size it is needed, so a 32px inventory icon and a 170px ledger plate are the same authored form rather than two assets that can drift apart. The plugin ships no images and loads none at runtime.

• 56 guild forms across 14 guilds — an anvil, a stag, a crucible, a wax seal, a chalice
• 8 metal palettes — Iron, Steel, Bronze, Silver, Electrum, Cold Iron, Meteoric, Blackened
• 6 rank ornaments — Struck, Ringed, Banded, Cartouche, Laurel, Sunburst
• 24 affix glyphs struck along the lower arc

That is 94 hand-authored visual entities, and 56 × 8 × 6 = 2,688 distinct marks before affixes are counted.

Nothing is random

The same item strikes the same mark, in this save and every other one, because the mark is derived rather than rolled:

• Guild — the item's weapon or armour type, so every axe is marked by one guild and every staff by another, and the player learns to read the shelf at a glance
• Form and metal — a stable hash of the item's identity
• Rank — the item's own price, against price steps you set
• Affix glyphs — its rolled parameter bonuses, attack elements, element rates and state traits

Change one Mark Seed parameter and the whole world re-casts. The same seed always produces the same world.

Built for rolled and independent items

If another plugin hands the party its own cloned item objects — the usual shape for an ARPG loot system — Hallmark marks those too, and reads the clone's properties. Two swords rolled from one base with different affixes strike two different marks. Nothing needs registering and no API has to be called.

The Assay Ledger

A second scene the player fills as the party handles items: their own book of proof marks, with a completion count against the full corpus. The leather, the gilt rules, the ruled grid, the bracket cursor and the shimmer travelling across the selected mark are all drawn by the plugin — it contains no RPG Maker chrome at all, no windowskin and no default font.

What ships

• Three raw, readable, uncompressed JavaScript files — no minification, because you may need to extend them
• 8 plugin parameters, 3 plugin commands, and a one-line notetag to override any part of a mark
• <hallmark: none> opts an item out entirely and restores its ordinary iconset icon
• Marks are rendered once per (mark, size) and cached — nothing in the Ledger's update loop draws
• Versioned, lossless save round-trip

Verified in the real RPG Maker MZ runtime, not only in tests: 104 headless tests and 42 in-engine assertions, each of the three historically unreliable counters checked against a positive control that proves it fires.

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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. HallmarkForms.js — the mark corpus. 56 hand-authored guild forms, 8 metal palettes, 6 rank ornaments and 24 affix glyphs, all drawn as vector geometry
2. Hallmark.js — the engine: derivation, rendering, icon substitution
3. HallmarkLedger.js — the Assay Ledger scene

Load order is a tidiness request, not a requirement — nothing reads the corpus until Scene_Boot, so the three files work in any order. If another plugin also extends drawItemName, load Hallmark after it and both will run.

Core methods extended — all 3 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Scene_Boot.prototype.start, Game_System.prototype.initialize, Window_Base.prototype.drawItemName.

In particular Window_Base.prototype.drawIcon is deliberately not patched, so every icon Hallmark has no opinion about — items, skills, states, your own custom windows — is drawn by the engine exactly as before.

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

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More RPG Maker MZ systems from Core Systems Asset Factory

• Armorial — every character earns a coat of arms composed from what they actually did
• Sigil Core — every spell draws its own animated seal from its own data
• Bazaar Core — the economy under your shops: supply, demand and depleting stock
• Chimera Core — genetics, breeding and box storage for a collection game
• Lineage — heritable traits across generations

Hallmark is by Core Systems Asset Factory. Browse everything: csaf.itch.io

Asterism — a constellation skill tree where every node draws its own star, generated from the skill it teaches.

Niello — every weapon and armour draws its own engraved plate — and the plate records what the item has done, so a blade looks different at hour 40.