I’ve run several Daredevil games at North Texas using Kolchak: The Night Stalker characters. Jack “Bones” Burton has always been one of the player characters, and he has always been played by Scott Hammonds. Scott noticed the same thing I did about the Kolchak series’s high school anthropology teacher: his background looked a lot like his later namesake, Jack “It’s all in the reflexes” Burton from Big Trouble in Little China. The biology teacher’s dream was travel. He hated working at a high school. He may have slightly—just a little—overestimated his standing in the world. Add in a little military background—in Vietnam before the United States left after the 1973 Peace Accords—and a big mouth, and why not put the two together?

Scott Hammonds himself may have shared a little background with the the two fictional Jacks:

Scott was a Navy veteran, stationed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from 1982 to 1986. He served aboard the USS America as an aviation electronic technician, where he learned the skills that brought him a long and illustrious civilian career in tech and hardware engineering.

If that reads like an obituary, it’s because Jerry Scott Hammonds died on August 4, 2023. Until this year, Scott had been in every Kolchak adventure I’ve run at the North Texas RPG Convention, as well as the only DC Heroes game I’ve run, a Blackhawk game in 2020.

After NTRPGC 2023, he wrote in praise of the games he played, including:

Game 5. KOLCHAK the Wrong Goodbye. Old school Kolchak the TV series game world. Jerold Stratton has run this Kolchak before and I’ve had a blast each time. This was no exception everybody had fun and running relatable TV characters got everyone into character… especially Stephen who ran Miss Emily!!! Kolchak was run well too. Looking forward to next year.

Well, next year came along and when Kolchak: Far Out, My Idol sold out Scott hadn’t signed up. I did an Internet search to find a way to contact him and discovered his August 4 obituary.

It was a shock. I’d just figured he had a scheduling conflict, or hadn’t gotten to it in time (everything sold out so fast this year!), or couldn’t make it to the con, and wanted to reach out to find out which. I never expected to discover that there would be no “next year”.

Scott was a great guy to game with. Not just as a player in one of my games, but as a fellow player in other games. We ended up in Merle Rasmussen’s Sunday morning New World Order Lego games a couple of times, and that was always memorable!

If Scott hadn’t been as supportive as he was after Blackhawk in 2020 and then my impromptu 2021 Kolchak, I don’t know that I would have kept the Kolchak games going.

Just as some authors have a fictional ideal reader in mind when they’re writing, I have an ideal gamer. Someone who will enjoy poking at the world from odd and unpredictable angles, then ask surprisingly unanticipated questions, and finally come up with completely unpredicted solutions. There is no one gamer who is this ideal gamer, but when it came to designing convention games, especially Kolchak, Scott came very close.

That is, when evaluating ideas for a Kolchak adventure, I often asked myself “what would old Jack Burton do?” I’ll probably continue asking it. But I’ll no longer find out how close to the truth my answer was.

Rest in Peace, Scott. May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.