Interview with the Creators of Sooty Beards

Warehouse Team @

We talked to Furtive Goblin, John Gregory, and Charles Ferguson-Avery, the creators of Sooty Beards, about their decaying American-gothic inspired dwarfy setting, embracing the weird, and designing for OSR. 

Sooty Beards is a system-neutral adventure setting designed for OSR-style games, and can be plugged into an existing campaign or used to kick off a new adventure. Inspired by the depressive gloom of a decaying American coal town blended with the rich grotesquery of gothic fantasy, Sooty Beards is about the once-prosperous dwarven coal-mining city of Vesallberg in the heart of a dying mountain.

Hi, thanks for chatting with us! Tell us a little about yourself and what you do. 

Furt: Heya, and thanks for having me. I am the Furtive Goblin, but you can just call me Furt. I'm technically a writer and published author from Upstate New York. I blog about games, fantasy, and whatever else coalesces out of my grey matter, and occasionally that turns into a proper TTRPG book. I've also started developmental editing on the side recently.

John: Howdy, thanks for your interest y’all. I’m John Gregory, also known as TheLawfulNeutral or TLN, whichever’s fine. I’m from the Sea Island of South Carolina, though I’m now smack dab in the middle of the Midwest. I started off blogging after being inspired by GoblinPunch and ThroneofSalt, then got into writing zines with the help of Technical Grimoire. Furt and I have been playing TTRPGs together for about ten years now, so I knew the goblin I had to call when we got into writing bigger materials. Generally speaking these days I do more crafting than writing, but when Furt calls, I come.

Charlie: Howdy! I’m Charlie, an illustrator and one-half of Feral Indie Studio, a game publisher and creative studio based in rural Pennsylvania. In addition to freelance illustration, layout, and writing, I also have a few titles I’ve created as part of our studio. 


What is Sooty Beards?

Furt: Sooty Beards is our second foray into designing system-agnostic miniature campaign settings, this one focusing on Vesallberg, a dying dwarf hold built under a lonely inselberg of the same name. Our first mini campaign setting was Bridgetown, published by Technical Grimoire. Bridgetown is folkloric and pastoral with a liminal and existential edge. We sort of wound up doing the opposite with Sooty Beards, which is more funky and starkly grounded, but with fuzzy edges and a grim whimsy (grimsy, as we say) to it that delivers a bit of humor amid all the dust-choked mine tunnels and dwarvish urban decay.

John: As Furt said, Sooty Beards is about a dwarf hold that is spiraling downward in more than one way. We pulled a lot of inspiration from the dying Appalachian coal mining towns that half my genetics hail from mixed with some of the mountain folk you get from Furt’s Catskills and my Ozarks. You end up with a cramped hole full of paranoid, desperate and superstitious folks who would sell their grandma for a chance to strike one rich seam. On a continuum of book vibes that Furt and I have worked on, Sooty Beards lays pretty squarely in the middle between the almost pastel Bridgetown and the rust-and-cobwebs of The Book of Gaub. All of this, of course, is made all the better by the layout design and art provided by Charles Ferguson-Avery whose Appalachian roots are certainly on point.

Charlie: I don’t think I can really describe it any better than Furt and John. A dying dwarven mining town full of equal parts despair, humor and hope; a fair and poignant analogy for the industrial boom towns that all three of us grew up with. Furt and John are EXCELLENT writers, John is actually the main reason I got into the OSR, and have written a setting with a voice that is uniquely grim and hilarious.

Why OSR?

Furt: For me, the appeal of OSR lies in the design side of things. I grew up on 21st century games with a ton of customization and crunch, and an emphasis on universally applicable rules over individual table rulings. I still greatly enjoy those games, but developing for that type of gameplay is very challenging, and involves a lot of considerations of balance, pacing, and how new content meshes with existing rules. OSR doesn't really have any of that, or it does to a much lesser extent. The challenge of designing for OSR lies more in evoking tone and mood, or writing in a way that encourages player and referee creativity. I feel more confident in my ability as a writer there. It also helps in an incidental way that by the time I stumbled onto the edges of the scene back in the twilit Google+ years, "OSR" was already such a vague and nebulous genre name that as long as what I'm creating "feels" right, it's probably on the right track.

John: The Book of Gaub had an essay written about it back in 2022 that summed it up best, ”Just Vibes Baby”. I grew up on a bookless hodgepodge of a TTRPG that my first DM more or less made up from vague memories of her experiences with 2nd edition. After that I experienced 3.X and Pathfinder and, y’know, there was a certain experience in theory-crafting within the set rules with feats and skills etc. etc. But as time went on it felt like it was all about the rules and not about the actual experience. Then I came across the blogosphere, lucky enough to have been able to steer far away from the bad actors and instead learn from some greats like Throne of Salt, GoblinPunch, Coins and Scrolls and the like. GLOG (Goblin Laws of Gaming), TROIKA!, and Cairn appealed to me with the energy of rulings not rules, vibes over details, the experience of being a weird little dude not some Big Damn Hero. I’ve just felt more like I was among similar souls who appreciated d100 lists of weird nonsense over figuring out how many pluses you could cheese into a d20 roll.

Charlie: The OSR remains my favorite, albeit intangible, space to design in. Stumbling into the OSR was the first time I saw role-playing games as creatively freeing. It wasn’t about being shackled to heavy rulebooks (unless you wanted it to be), polished artwork (unless you wanted it to be), or being beholden to a singular company brand (as it shouldn’t be); rather, it felt to me a place that everyone was an artist, communicating a vision through gonzo settings, gameplay philosophies, or avant-garde art styles. Sooty Beards is no exception, it is a piece of creative vision that I am lucky enough to be able to contribute to.

What inspired the feel of Vesallberg?

Furt: As usual, my inspiration came from listening to a creator who is much better than me. I was watching a real-life locations in the Fallout series travelogue by the video essayist Noah Caldwell-Gervais, in which he dedicated part of his trip through West Virginia to the history of the coal mining communities there, their hardships and struggles against authority, and the economic impacts of staying reliant on outmoded industries in changing times.

I found that really compelling as the basis for a fantasy community, and it sat in the back of my mind and stewed for months. Eventually it merged with some older ideas about socialist dwarves I've had, inspired by the People's Republic of Mordengard from the early 2000s Chainmail reboot. But I focused more on the fitful, oftentimes unsuccessful struggle toward equality in freedom, instead of having the revolution all done and over with and the nice neat workers' council functioning perfectly because all the dwarves are Lawful Good.

The folksy, vaguely Midwestern tinge to the Vesallbergers arrived when one day I was thinking about all of the different accents that have been ascribed to dwarves over the years across different fantasy settings; Scottish of course, but also Russian, German, various Scandinavian languages, and even American Broadcast English. I decided that with Vesallberg's history as an isolated former colony, giving them such a deeply American accent heavily influenced by immigrants like the Norskies would help characterize them as a distinct branch of a familiar old thing.

All of those influences came together to form the thematic backdrop of the setting, but they would've stayed bullet points on a document had John not helped make things properly gothic and Weird.

John: Sooty Beards is Furt’s baby, I just helped make it happen. The roots of it have been growing through his brain for years, I watered the ideas with some inspiration and tales from the weirder branches of my own family then spent days being an absolute psycho of a hype man in Google Docs. Our writing process is often made up of Furt bullet-ing out these deep concepts then I swoop in with something left field and eccentric. I like to think he really provided the meat and potatoes for this hotdish and I provided the gravy.

Charlie: The manuscript spoke for itself. The second I printed it off and read it, I started sketching and was excited to do the writing justice.

Grimy, grim, but also silly; I grabbed charcoal, graphite, dipped my thumb in ink and scratched away at these cartoons of flea-ridden dwarves in their crumbling hold. There’s a page or two of exploratory drawings in my sketchbook that sadly couldn’t make it into the book. It was one of those projects that felt miraculously effortless.

I will admit, Furt and John thankfully reeled me in when I started to get too dark with the illustrations; saved to my computer is a first draft of the cover that is creepy to look at…

Tell us about Charlie Ferguson-Avery’s art!

Furt: It’s fricking rad.

In seriousness though, I've admired Charlie's work since before I did anything professionally, back when he and John worked on Gourmet Street together. He excels at spooky and revels in silly, and he always manages to either know what we're looking for in a particular illustration, or come up with something even better.

John: I met Charlie on Reddit after he reached out to me about how much he enjoyed one of my blog posts, and we’ve been a constant source of inspiration and friendship since then. He (and Alex Coggan of Feral Indie Studios) have a diversity of style and skill that is hard to match--I’ve met few other artists who can swap between the horrifically beautiful creatures in his “Into The” series to the absolute silliness we get in Snail Fanciers and Bridgetown. He’s one of the reasons I’ve gotten to this point and I absolutely look forward to working with him more in the future.


 

What’s the response been like from players?

Furt: The response has been pretty positive so far. My impression is that we nailed the atmosphere of the world while leaving a lot of room for player curiosity and freedom, both freedom of interpretation and of what to do in the city and surrounding environs. Embarrassing as it is to mention, even my aunt who's never played an RPG in her life praised the evocative writing in a Facebook post.

John: Honestly, I want to see more responses. We’ve had a live play by Wandering Monster, we’ve had great comments by some bloggers, podcasters and the folks over in the Troika! Discord channel seem to be happy with it. But honestly? I want to hear more. If any of yall reading this interview have played or read Sooty Beards, I want to know about it. DM me on discord, email me at TheLawfulNeutral@gmail.com, comment on Unlawful.Games. There are few things more potent than your comments to inspire Furt and I to do more!

Charlie: Second to what John said. The words we’ve heard are good, but I’d love for more folks to get their eyes on it. It’s worth the space on the shelf.

What else are you working on these days?

Furt: I've been trying my hand at developmental editing lately. It's very different and kind of scary, but also refreshing to not be fretting over my own writing for once. Shout-out to Asa Donald's SPINE, speaking of which. I've also got a Free Kriegspiel Revolution-inspired game in the works which I hope to shop around soon; it’s my first crack at the genre.

John: Most recently I’ve done some work for 72 Stations on their Infinity of Ships and 100 Strangers, with a possible expansion of Gourmet Street coming in 2026 alongside Adam Good. I would really like to work on more projects with Furt and perhaps a second edition of The Book of Gaub—but until I am called for, my hands have lately been more used for Needle Felting mushrooms and weird little dudes over writing.

Charlie: Good lord… loads. On deck is the last book of out “Into” series which feels like a bittersweet finale to over a decade of work. Then there’s a skirmish game I plan to finish up, a dungeon module for OSE, a rulebook and setting I’m writing with Alex Coggon, some freelance work, and building a banjo.


What do you like to do when you’re not creating games?

Furt: I realize it's game-adjacent, but my blog is still trundling along, and I put a good bit of my creative energy into that. I also spend way more time than I should playing Total War: Warhammer 3 or watching YouTube videos, and not enough time lately listening to music. I like dungeon synth, Mongolian folk metal, weird genre crossover covers of popular songs, and the occasional bit of jazz or post-rock.

John: I’m a full time dad 99% of the time, keeping my kid busy with karate, crafting and for some reason multiplication because she’s a weird little math-loving goblin. In my remaining free time that isn’t spent catching my breath, I needle felt creations for a local artisan store under the name of “I Felt That.” I actually felted some Dwarves for Sooty Beards but no one went for them--honestly I’m making better dwarves now than I did when it was first published so if anyone is interested y’know, reach out eh?

Charlie: Thankfully, lots of stuff. Taking time to go dancing, keeping up with local friends, painting for myself, trying (and failing) to beat my Warhammer 3 empire campaign, exercise and cooking good food. I’m always thankful for the work I get to do, but it is equally great to feel like a human being with friends and hobbies.