Welcome to Zurvan’s Laboratory

Zurvan’s Laboratory is a place for experimentation with tabletop game design, worldbuilding, and speculative fiction.

Join me on an experiential journey to perfect my craft and ideally we can learn something together along the way. Subscribe to stay updated!

My 52 week game-mechanic design journey

In September 2025, in a fit to teach myself something about the TTRPG game-design craft, and with no prior experience other than gameplay and a bit of homebrew, I rather rashly volunteered myself to create 52 game mechanics - or mini-systems - for tabletop roleplaying games …in 52 weeks.

While I had ideas of my own, I needed more, and so I reached out to the Reddit r/RPGDesign community, offering to create systems for them to rate, critique, and use. They very generously came through, filling my list of ideas with over 30 themes and scenarios to develop.

This site came into being as a place to host these designs, and my first real mini-game/mechanic design request from the community: Zurvan’s Showcase, a TTRPG mini-game for running shows and performances, and a mechanic for managing PC fame.

You can read all about it in my first blog post:

Zurvan’s Laboratory is part of a wider worldbuilding effort by Hidden Föld. While I encourage the remixing of all game mechanics published on this site, I ask that if you use my work, please let me know, link to my related post, and give me a credit in your output!

Get in touch here: contact@hiddenfold.com