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Have you ever noticed how certain gaming companies will tell you that they don't have enforcers out checking up on you making sure you are playing their game 'right'. Well they may not have enforcers, but they definitely have invisible spies, like everywhere man. I can't remember the number of times some variant of a plot I have participated in has shown up in some gaming companies product.
So hey anybody else have any crazy stories along these lines, or am I just a crazy conspiracy nut. BTW I'm not talking about plots that were sold to a company legitimately, just seemingly out of nowhere type stuff.
Graywulfe
PS thus far this has not occured to me via any Paizo product.
Our gaming group swears that various companies have been keeping hidden microphones at our gaming sessions for years.
Example: A friend and I created a homebrew campaign world that had strange and wonderful physical phenomena caused by a fiendish apocalypse in its antiquity. Boiling oceans, fleshy forests, a great chasm in the earth like a wound, etc. Swords & Sorcery came out with the Scarred Lands, which was eerily similar. Paizo's Golarion, of course, has the World Wound which is quite similar to the Great Wound of our homebrew.
I think the problem is that we all draw from a vast well of myth, legend, history, and pop culture, and even when we don't think that we are, often times we're just reinventing the wheel. Honestly, there is nothing wrong with that, especially when you take elements of Myth A and combine them with Pop Culture Reference B instead of just changing the proper names from Legend C, or you tweak one or two key elements of the same.
In the end, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and the only people that annoy me are the ones that try to convince you that the giant isn't there.
Now sometimes it does feel a bit freaky when I know that I used some obscure pop culture reference and then I see someone else reference that, but I'm willing to bet if I could properly defrag the hard drive in my brain, I'd probably figure out what recent event triggered a resurgence in people remember said obscure pop culture reference.
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And, of course, we all know things that we don't know we know and they just vanish into our subconcious. Then we dredge them from what we think is imagination only to find that someone else beat us to the punch.
Like my 'creation' of the Medallion of Faith from Dragonlance as a unique wondrous item.
I was POSITIVE that I'd made that up brand new. *sighs*