Verdict Core - Investigation, Cross-Examination & Deduction for RPG Maker MZ

Keep your clue system. This is the part where the player has to be right.

Every clue plugin for RPG Maker MZ tracks what the player has found. None of them resolves a piece of evidence against a claim. Verdict Core does — and it answers with three results, not two.

The result nothing else on the store models

• CONTRADICTION — the right exhibit, aimed at the right line. The statement breaks, and what the break reveals goes on the record as a fact.
• CLOSE — the right exhibit, aimed at the wrong line. The game says the evidence matters here, just not against this claim, and points at the statement that would have worked. By default it costs nothing.
• WRONG — unrelated evidence. It costs credibility. Run out and the case collapses.

That middle answer is the whole design. A binary right/wrong turns a mystery into a lock with a key in it. A near miss turns it into an argument.

Nothing is scripted per case

You author what each exhibit establishes and what each statement claims. The engine derives the rest: which statements an exhibit can break, which blanks it can fill, which conclusions the corkboard will accept. Hand the player a new exhibit and every one of those answers updates itself.

Three scenes, and none of them look like RPG Maker

• The Case File — exhibits down one side, the opened dossier on the other, and the facts each one proves.
• The Cross-Examination — testimony on aged paper, press a statement or present an exhibit against it, credibility kept in tally marks.
• The Case Board — a corkboard. Pin two cards, and if they mean something together the red string stays and a conclusion appears that neither card held alone.
• The Deduction — a sentence with blanks. Commit it and the sheet takes a stamp: CASE MADE, or OVERRULED with the failed blanks struck through in red.

There is no windowskin anywhere in this plugin. The paper grain, the photo corners, the pushpins, the wax stamps, the typewriter and serif type scale and the staggered card-deal easing are all drawn procedurally at runtime. That is a headline feature, not a skin — and it only styles its own scenes, so installing this does not restyle your menus, your shop or your battles.

What ships

• Two raw, readable, commented JavaScript files — 4,069 lines, no minification
• 13 plugin commands, five of which read the investigation back into switches and variables so your events can branch on it with no script call
• 55 parameters across 6 data structures — exhibits, statements, testimonies, link rules, deductions, blanks
• Every colour and both font stacks are parameters. Motion can be switched off entirely for accessibility
• Versioned, lossless saves that store ids only, never your case text — so you can rewrite a statement after a player has saved and their save still loads
• No core method overwritten; every patch extends the prototype and calls the saved original
• No Math.random() in game logic — a seeded generator, so a case plays out identically from the same seed

Verified, not asserted

• 61/61 headless tests green
• Measured inside the real MZ engine at 1.76–1.85 ms per frame — about 11% of the 60 FPS budget, with 0 of 1,800 measured frames over budget
• 22/22 in-engine checks, including a save round-trip through MZ's own JsonEx

Requirements

RPG Maker MZ. No other plugin required, and no dependency on any specific clue, quest or dialogue system — Verdict Core sits beside them.

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More RPG Maker MZ systems from CSAF:
Chronicle Core — branching quests, choices and world state
Bazaar Core — supply, demand, stock and trade routes
Chimera Core — creature genetics, breeding and evolution
Chimera Field — spawn tables, rarity tiers and a field guide
Chimera Battle — type charts, move sets, status and battle AI
Sigil Core — every skill draws its own animated sigil, generated from that skill's element, cost, scope and damage type. No icon sheet to buy.

Also from CSAF: we build editor tooling for other engines too — Kinetic UI and Trove for GameMaker, CoreCLR Migration Scanner and Play Compliance for Unity, and Asset Sentinel and Migration Ledger for Unreal. Everything at csaf.itch.io.