Did I Just Unintentionally Alter Reality Itself?

So here's the story: in my Wild West campaign, which I regularly post play-blogs about on here, I've got a character named Cooter.

Cooter is an NPC, who started out as a fairly minor character in Dodge city. He was the jailor and caretaker in the Sheriff's office. He was a southerner, missing one eye, somewhat dim but friendly and well-meaning, with an obsession with brewing the best coffee in town.

At first, this was pretty much all the PCs knew about Cooter, but as he went on, Cooter became more and more central as an NPC in their adventures. They learned more about him: his propensity to be perpetually broke, and to mooch off his friends in an endearing rather than annoying sort of way. His fear of horses (as it turns out, he lost his eye when he was kicked by a horse) but his love for a good mule. His friendship/rivalry with the Marshall's jailor.
They also learned about his crazy family, all of whom were of the rustic goofball sort like himself, including some gun-crazy cousins, indomitable aunts, and neighbors from back home who were in a century-old family feud with the family.  They also learned that Cooter was both his first and last name ("Cooter Cooter"), in an unusual family tradition apparently.  And (this is the crucial part) at some point just where in the south he came from was determined to be Missouri, and that in fact he came from a place called Cooter.

Now, I should note, I've never been to Missouri, and out of the great states of the USA, it's certainly on the bottom half of the list of "States the Pundit knows fuck all about".  I could tell you quite a bit about New York, California, the Pacific Northwest or New England, or even Louisiana and Florida, but I'll admit that to me, Missouri is just really this blob of Mason-Dixon rustic stereotype. It just felt like the kind of place Cooter Cooter could be from, and a locality called Cooter could exist.


Now here's where shit gets weird: a couple of days ago, I discovered entirely by chance that apparently, Cooter, Missouri DOES really exist. It is, in fact, a small town in the southern tip of the southernmost county of southern Missouri.

The only question now is whether it already existed before this campaign; or if somehow, by memetic force, the power of Cooter in my campaign altered reality to make Cooter, MO a real place?

You have to be careful with RPGs: they create a virtual world. But if you're playing a world that is a very close reflection of our own, and if your GM happens to be a wizard, you never know what might happen!

RPGPundit

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