Photograph by Brightside Photography (http://brightsidephotography.co.uk/). Image editing and concept by good friend of the Good Friends, Oli Palmer.

Who Are We?

 Matthew Sanderson

Matthew had ambitions to be a writer long before he heard of roleplaying games. An avid reader of horrors and thrillers, he discovered RPGs two weeks before his GSCE exams and hasn’t looked back since. Over the last ten years, he has run and played a great many RPGs. His main passions are games with a horror theme – Call of Cthulhu, Unknown Armies, Kult, Over the Edge, Heaven & Earth, the Esoterrorists, and The World of Darkness.

Matthew regularly runs one-shot scenarios at various tabletop conventions across the United Kingdom. One such game led to him getting noticed by Simon Rogers of Pelgrane Press and the subsequent publication of his first scenario, “The Love of Money” for The Esoterrorists. Since then, Matthew has written for Vampire the Masquerade (the first roleplaying game he ever played), Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu.

 Paul Fricker

Paul Fricker has been keen on roleplaying games since a school friend introduced him to Dungeons and Dragons. Armed with a few photocopied pages he and his friends would gather at the end of every Friday in the school canteen. It was a few years later that the same friend lent him a copy of Pickman’s Model, and Paul has been an avid Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu fan ever since.

Around 2001 Paul became part of the UK group, The Kult of Keepers, writing and running scenarios at numerous games conventions in England and Germany. Some of those scenarios were published, the first of which was Gatsby and the Great Race (a Chaosium MULA, edited by Scott Dorward). Gatsby’s unique selling point is that it blends multiple games for up to 24 players at once. ‘My Little Sister Wants You to Suffer’, a science-fiction scenario, was published in Cthulhu Britannica by Cubicle 7. Paul published Dockside Dogs, a modern-day gangster scenario, in aid of Cancer Research. Paul is also the co-author of the new seventh edition of Call of Cthulhu.

Twitter: @paulfricker and Substack (blog/newsletter): paulfricker.com

 Scott Dorward

Scott has been playing and running roleplaying games since stumbling into a game of AD&D in the early 1980s. When Call of Cthulhu arrived in the UK, Scott played it obsessively for the rest of the decade. He also read every Mythos tale he could get his hands on. These took their toll and he hasn’t been quite right since.

After running a ridiculous number of games at UK conventions, Scott was asked to write for a number of RPGs produced by friends. These included Dead of Night, Hot War, Cthulhu Dark and Jaws of the Six Serpents. Since then, he has written for Chaosium, Cubicle 7 and Pelgrane Press, specialising in Lovecraftian horror. Scott also worked as the line developer for Cubicle 7’s World War Cthulhu until 2017.

Realising that working from home was more sanity-blasting than any Lovecraftian horror, Scott took up a creative space at Arts Central in Milton Keynes in 2015. He uses the facilities there to run a regular workshop for writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror.