LastChaos Sorcerer guide

First, make a textbox in the painting program of your choice, making it's shape, colors and whatever completely up to you. I'd make it roughly the size of an actual RM textbox. (Base the picture around a screenshot of your game with a textbox showing. Take a shot of a textbox displaying a blank message, then cut the box out and make your custom over that. This way it will be the right size.)
Save it as a Bitmap, 256 colors, in your project's Picture folder.
Now, enter your project in RM. Go to Common Events, and make a Parrelel Process event called "Make Textbox". Have it "Show Picture", the picture being your textbox picture at X120, Y-50. You can have it at whatever transparancy you want, so you can make cool looking semi transparent boxes if you like by setting transparency to 40%.
Now, whenver you have speech in your game, do this. Have it "Message Display Options, transparent, top, with Don't Hide Hero NOT TICKED", then have it "Move Picture to X120, Y30 taking 02 seconds and wait until done." Then, have the message displayed, then "Move Picture to X120, Y-50 taking 02 seconds and wait until done."
There, that will make a custom message box slide down from the top of the screen, have a message displayed in it, then slide back out.

Note: This only works if the picture file of your custom is exactly the size of a shot of just a blank RM textbox, screenshotted in full screen mode then cut off the picture. So, roughly the hight of a quarter of the RM games screen, and the RM games screen's width.

Part Two: Scan or Libra battle ability (Like Final Fantasy)
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Okay, go into Database, go into Battle Layout and make a new command called Scan. Have it be a Skill Subset. Now, go into Skills and make a skill called "Scan" which is of the Scan subset. Make it's MP cost and animation as you wish. Have it target one enemy, and have it's effect rating 0 and it doesn't deal damage or have elemental attributes. If you want it to be a spell, and be disabled when the user is Silenced, put it's Magic Influence up to 9. Or else don't.
Now, decide who uses it and make a way for them to learn it. It's best to only have one hero able to know it, because the scripting of this gets harder and longer for each additional hero.
Go into M.Groups, and make an event triggered when "Heroname" uses the "Scan" command.
Now, let's say this group has two monsters, a Goblin and a Malboro, put into the group in that order, so their monster numbers are 1 and 2 respectively.
We put a Conditional Branch with an else case asking "If Monster (Add monster number here) is targetted". If so, make variable "MonsterHP" find the monster's HP (Not Max HP), "Monster MP" set to it's MP (Not Max MP). Now, have it display a message "Monstername, HP \v[x], MP \v[x] (x is the HP and MP variable's variable ID number in the variable list) weak against whatever".
Now, in the Else Case, copy and paste this event into it, changing the monster ID it checks to the next number and changing "Monstername" and the weaknesses to suit that monster.
Do this for each monster in the group.
So, using our example, this would check whether the Goblin or Malboro (If Monster 1... Else... If Monster 2...) was targetted by scan, then displays a box saying their name, HP, MP and weaknesses, immunities etc etc.
If more than one character uses Scan, copy the whole event page and paste it and change the hero referenced in the trigger.
Now, copy this whole event page you just made into every monster group you have, altering the messages in the Conditional Branches to suit the monsters in each group and adding more, taking away if need be.

It's tedious, but works faithfully.

Note: You can alter this in so many ways. You don't have to display the monster name, you can have extra variables track and display Max HP/Max MP, Attack Defense etc etc, you don't have to display weakness, strength, immunity etc or you can even add an extra message box with an FF8 style bio of the creature. It's up to you.

Part Three: An AP based Tech research system (Like Tales Of Worlds 2)
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This will help you make the characters earn AP in battle, which they then spend on new abilities in a pull down menu.
First, go in your M.Groups and add this event to all your groups; Turns Elapsed 0, variable "AP" increase by however much you want. (I did 2). This is how much Ap they earn per battle.
Now, make an item, called "Ability Tome" description "Displays how much Ap you have" and is a switch item wihich turns on "CheckAP".
Go into Common Events, and make a Parrelel Process event triggered by the switch "CheckAP". Make it display a message box saying "You have \v[x] AP", x being the ID number of the AP variable.
Then have it turn off the switch "CheckAP".
Now, go into Skills and make a skill called "Research Skills" and make it a switch, turning on "ResearchMenu1". Make this skill for one person only.
Now, back to Common Events, make a parrelel process event activated by "ResearchMenu1". Display message saying "Which Tech will you learn?"
Then a Show Choice with two skills and their AP costs as choices, and "More" as a third choice and "Exit" as a fourth. When they choose "More" show another Show Choice, with two techs and a "More" and a "Previous". Do this until you have all your game's skills in a menu. Have it so whenever "More" is picked, the next menu shows, and label each new choice (Label) with a new label, so when a "Previous" is picked, it jumps to the previous label, thus the last menu shown. Turn the cancellation behaviour of all menus to Ignore and don't touch "Exit" from the first menu.
Now, for each tech choice, have a conditional branch checking that the variable AP is at least of higher than the tech's AP cost. If it isn't just display a message "Not Enough AP".
If it is however, show a message "learn "Skillname"?" show choice Yes or No (If No, jump to the current label so it goes back to the current list) and if yes, have a conditional branch checking if that person already knows that skill. If they don't add it to them, and subtract the Ap cost from variable AP, then display message "Learned" then jump to the current Label.
If they do know the skill, show message "Already know it!" and jump to the current label. This way the player can't waste AP by learning the same skill twice.
Do the above for every skill choice in your menu.
Then at the very bottom of the page, just below End put turn OFF switch "ResearchMenu1". Now, make a "Reaesearch Skills" skill for each other person, each one turning on a different switch ("Menu 2", Menu 3",) and copy the research menu common event, change the switch that triggers it, and change any parts that reference heroes to suit the hero the menu is used by.
There. Now, each character in game has their own research menu that can be pulled up by the player going into "Skills" in the menu and using the "Research Skills" ability that belongs to the character they want to research new skills for, spending the Ap they earned in battles on the skills. The menus keep track of which skills the characters know and which they don't.

Note: That was long and hard but it works great. You can alter it more, by having different Techs learnable in different character's menus, by having level restrictions by adding a conditional branch that checks the character's level, and bars them using it if it's not high enough, or even checking if they know a precursor skill first, which they need to know of they can't learn it, for example you must have "Fire" before you can learn "Fira" or you won't be able to get "Fira".


Well, that's all in the tome! See you in the next one! And play my game will you!