Weird Coincidences

[Logan D]

I was driving home from work today and because there was a wreck on the freeway on my usual route (and thankfully I heard about it on the radio before I got stuck in the backup), I took an alternate route. On this alternate route was a little landmark I had almost forgotten about. And I said to myself, "I have to share this with the Hero Boards."

 

What it's all about is this - A few years ago, I was running a Champs game. Of course, the home setting was our home area of Dallas/Ft. Worth. I was running the murder mystery out of Champions Presents #2. And I needed a bar for a fight that was likely to occur between a couple of our team members and a group of low powered super-thugs/henchmen.

 

Well, there was this little dive called "O'Malleys Bar" in a downscale section of Dallas known as Oak Cliff. It's right off one of the freeways and its flickering neon sign is easily seen from the road if you know where to look. I took a peek at it and figured that it would do for a location. It looked kinda like the sort of location where some ne-er-do-wells would hang out at.

 

Well, we ran the adventure and sure enough, a fight broke out. Started off as a classic bar-room brawl, but because of the super-powers involved, things got quickly out of hand.

 

A good time was had by all.

 

The bar didn't survive. But I figured, what with superfight insurance and such, it could be rebuilt and serve again at a later date.

 

The weird part is -

 

A couple of weeks after the gaming session, I happened to drive past that same real-life bar.

 

The sign said, "NEW O'Malley's Bar"

 

To say that I goggled would be an understatement.

 

So - anybody else have any Twilight Zone moments like that?

[tkdguy]

When I was in college, the dormitory I stayed in had only six floors. One night I dreamt about returning to the dorm after class. Strangely enough, the elevator looked different and had more buttons than was necessary for six floors.

 

Of course, I shrugged it off as a dream. A few weeks later, I visited someone in another building. Guess how the elevator looked like when I stepped inside!

[Badger]

Well one time when I was a teenager, I felt some feeling of a kind of sadness out of the blue my mind kept straying to a great-uncle of mine. An hour later my mother called to say she had just found out he had died. The time of death was within 2 minutes of when I had that feeling.

[devlin1]

I dreamt about fish and had fish for dinner.

[AlHazred]

I once was agonizing so much over a climactic battle in a Fantasy Hero game I was running that, a few days before the event, I had a lucid dream where I played everything out: villain actions, PC reactions, dialogue, etc. I was stoked; as soon as I woke up, I wrote it all down while half-asleep.

 

The day of the game, I got to my friend's house early, pulled out my notes, and gave them the once over. It made NO SENSE. None of them. In my dream, I had accepted things quite naturally that made absolutely no logical sense and would have blown the players' sense of suspended disbelief. On the other hand, at least my gauging of the players' reactions to events would have been spot on...

[tkdguy]

This is my mom's sory actually. The night my grandfather died in the hospital, my mom checked on us (my sister and I were not yet 10). She instantly smelled the scent of the hospital ward. She heard me crying and begging my grandfather not to leave. I have no recollection of that night, but my father told me the next day about my grandfather's death.

[Blue]

My friend John once ran a Call-of-Cthulhu adventure. This was one of my first ever, as I was (at that time) unfamiliar with this brand of horror. We had a great time and soon came the incident in which the Doles caused earthquakes all over California.

 

Well, we took a break to go to the store and while we're in the 7-11 drinking Big Gulps and playing video games, an Earthquake happens.

 

Well, this is only a minor coincidence What I find really funny is that ten years later I hook up with my current crew of RPG players and they have an exactly similar story involving Doles and Earthquakes.

 

Worse yet, apparently they had a long history of weird coincidences involving famous people dying when they've been included in the game as characters.

[Vex]

Let's try for an online weird experience....Logan, do you happen to game with either Frank Bean or Chris Allen?

[RobCRogers]

Re: Weird Coincidences

 

Let's try for an online weird experience....Logan' date=' do you happen to game with either Frank Bean or Chris Allen?[/quote']

I've gamed a little with Frank.

[Sketchpad]

Re: Weird Coincidences

 

Huh ... I knew a Chris Allen many many many moons ago I don't suppose his family was in the Air Force, were they?

[Arkham]

Re: Weird Coincidences

 

Several years ago I was running a werewolf game set in San

Jose. During the course of the game, the PCs traveled to

Benecia/Martinez and destroyed one of the refineries there.

And about a month later, one of the refineries had an 'accident'.

 

Then in a Vampire game about a year later, one of the PCs

followed a group of werewolves on another destructive journey

to Benecia where they destroyed another refinery. And sure

enough about a month later, the refinery had an 'accident'.

 

One of the major NPCs in my World of Darkness is a Brujah

named Bob Walker who runs a private security firm. It was

quite a bit later that I found out that there was a Walker

Security company operating out of San Jose.

 

In a D&D game, through strange circumstances, it became a

running joke about minotaurs falling from the aether, and in

one game the falling minotaur landed on a random NPC along

a stretch of road, killing them. A few weeks later, on a

highway in ( I think it was Austria ), a cow fell from the

sky landing on a car, killing the driver. ( Actually, the

cow was grazing on the hillside above the exit of a tunnel

and fell down, but still... )

[Tech]

Funny

 

Many, many moons ago when I played D&D, my friend and brother were in a dungeon with our characters, they had just finished killing a monster. It went down with one hit. Just as my friend shouted out, "It's dead!?", an ambulance passed by outside. Now for the cherry on the top: we just happened to get this recorded on tape.

 

Champions-wise, one of the characters fired off a bio-electric energy blast at a villain and hit. The damage was rolled and called out. At that moment, someone outside loudly shouted something like "Wow!". Without losing a beat, my brother replied, "Well, it wasn't that good." Everyone laughed long and hard.

[MacBean]

Re: Weird Coincidences

 

Let's try for an online weird experience....Logan' date=' do you happen to game with either Frank Bean or Chris Allen?[/quote']

 

It's weird to google my name and have this post come up...

 

 

Vex, why did you ask?

 

FB

[VIPER]

Re: Weird Coincidences

 

Ok, nothing to do with RPG but...

 

Ever see the movie "the ring"?

 

First time I saw it in my old apartment, my wife left the room to go talk to her parents on the phone- she hates horror films.

 

Anyway, I'm watching the film alone and it comes to the part where the main character has watched the freaky film and then in the movie the phone starts ringing.

 

No joke, same time, my own remote phone which happens to be sitting beside me starts ringing.

 

Now, I can actually hear my wife still talking in the back room on the phone, while the one sitting right beside me is ringing away!

 

Needless to say, she happened to have used her cell phone for the call to her parents. But I hadn't figured that out when I answered.

 

I don't think my voice has cracked like that in 15 years or more. Certainly made it a memorable film for me.

 

V

[Stephen Mann]

Re: Weird Coincidences

 

In my life, I've had two instances of precognition; both happened in my early teens.

 

1) Two weeks before Nixon resigned, I dreamt of a local newspaper folded in such a way that I could only see the headline: "NIXON RESIGNS". Two weeks later, that was the headline our local paper used.

 

2) I dreamt of another folded newspaper with the headline: "HEARST FOUND". Two weeks later, Patty Hearts was found and arrested, and that was the headline our local newspaper used.

[ch0wyunf47]

Re: Weird Coincidences

 

Years ago, I was running a GURPS supers game (I hadn't learned champions yet, so be quiet =P) and I had the players investigating some strange government plot. They were infiltrating a secret base out in the desert and found an alien fighter and a lab where they had kept one of the aliens alive. I had everything diagramed out and fun was had by all.

 

The next day we go to see Independence Day and I'm sitting with my friends who I ran the adventure with. Low and behold, the lab where Brent Spiner shows off the Alien and the Alien fighter was pretty much exactly how I had diagramed the adventure out. The placement of the walk ways and the bay windows was what really caught our attention (exactly the same as my little maps). Of course, we had been joking about the possibility of it being the same as they entered the lab/storage area. It was pretty creepy.