Join us for another in a series of interviews with winners of awards from our 2023 Awards Ceremony. Our goal is to give you insight into how our fleet’s best simmers write, and imagine their characters as well as their out of character contributions and achievements.
This month we’re interviewing the writer behind Lt Kettick playing a Remmilian Acting Chief Engineer assigned to Denali Station. He won the Xalor Clan Xifilis Award:This is awarded to simmers who overcome a disadvantage throughout simming. This award was initially known as the “Rachel Garett Pendant,” but was renamed for the 2000 event to commemorate a valued StarBase 118 PBEM RPG simmer who died that year. In each event, this award can be given to all qualifying simmers.
Nilsen: Tell us a little about the writer behind the character — where in the world do you hail from?
Kettick: With pleasure. My name is Yann, I’m French, grew up in a little wine village in the South-West, then moved to Bordeaux, to keep up with the theme.
Nilsen: What attracted you to the Engineering role?
Kettick: To be honest, I rolled a dice to select the species of my character, and it landed on Remmilian. Given their background, Engineering made sense, and I felt that it had more potential than the Marines. Of course, the fact that I do actually work as a safety engineer doesn’t hurt either.
Nilsen: How long have you been roleplaying, and how did you come to join SB118?
Kettick: I’ve started roleplaying… somewhere in the 90s? And I’ve had a steady gaming group for some fifteen years now. That’s what led me to Starbase 118 back in 2014, in fact. I was browsing the Internet, looking for material for a Fading Suns campaign I was running at the time, and I stumbled upon the wiki. I had never tried PBeM before and I had an abundance of free time on my hands, so I thought I’d give it a try to see whether it was my cup of tea. As you can guess, it was.
Nilsen: I love what Oddas said about you, here is the quote:
“I am always in awe of the members of the crew who are able to write in other languages, let alone do it well. Mister Kettick now only does this player, but does it, so flawlessly it never registered this was the case, and he transcends the language barrier by writing interesting stories, funny stories, and plots that encourage others to participate. Kettick, Yann, is a great pick for this award and a player to watch for in the future. “
Tell us about your experiences with the language barrier and how writing stories has been helpful to you?
Kettick: I don’t really have issues with the language in itself (at least in written form, meye acceunt is a wool ovver matter), even if I wish that you guys would sit together and work on a common spelling once and for all, you would do us all who learned the “King’s English” at school a huge favour, spelling intentional.
Reading helped a lot – books, fanfiction, and of course everyone here at Starbase 118, every bit I read helps me expand my vocabulary and build my own style.
By now, the biggest hurdle is the autocorrect on my phone – the damnable thing tries to revert to French every second sentence and changes all my “the” by “thé” (tea) *laughs*.
Nilsen: What are some things you would like to do with your character in the future?
Kettick: Kettick started as a blank slate with little to no individuality, and no real culture of his own. I’d like him to grow his own identity and cultural references, and Denali is a perfect place for this, since it’s effectively a budding nation of its own. You have no idea how hard it is for me to write someone whose vocabulary doesn’t have any swear words.
Nilsen: What advice would you give anyone who wishes to play an engineer
Kettick: The unsung hero is still a hero. Other departments can handle the firefight going on, fly the ship into crazy acrobatics or negotiate with the hostile aliens. You focus on handling power distribution, making sure the reactor doesn’t go critical, and putting the exploding consoles back together with duct tape. After all, the others won’t be able to do anything if you don’t keep the ship together, and they will need that transporter fixed and properly aligned for the last-minute daring escape.
Oh, and, trust the classics. Treknobabble is well and good, but you can bet that even three hundred years from now, Engineers will still gripe about fools who don’t read the manual first, or make jokes about duct tape.
Thanks for your time, Lt Kettick!
