Several Irons In The Fire

I've been posting so far on the groundwork I'm doing for an upcoming three-player game. On top of that, it's looking like at some point (6-12 months from now?) I'll be running a separate D&D game for my current (larger) group.

Is this a problem? Heck, no. It's an opportunity, and on several levels.

Opportunity the First: The aforementioned larger group will be amenable to me running the game as a strongly-flavored, rule-tweaked 3.5, just as I intend to do with the smaller group. That means less work for me overall, and no need for the brain to shift gears dramatically in terms of ruleset.

Opportunity the Second: I'll use the same game-world. The exploits and additions of each group will help in building the world both for myself and for the other group. Plus, every ounce of thought or time I put into the setting gets double-payoff. And this leads into...

Opportunity the Third: Serious crossover potential. I've always wanted to do this - no doubt some of you have tried it - but I'd love to have the storylines from the two campaigns intertwine and lead up to a blowout crossover adventure where everyone from both groups shows up, teams up, and brings on the awesome. How cool would that be? Difficult to pull off, maybe. But the potential payoff is outstanding.

The campaign that will start first (the smaller one) will likely be playing far less often than the later-starting campaign; which might (with massaging) put everyone at around the same level come crossover time (this is a good thing).

My intent had always been to set the small campaign in the same game world as the one I would eventually run for the big group, but it didn't occur to me (who knows why) that I might end up doing both at the same time. But this could generate a lot of kickass. What if, even pre-teamup, the two groups are in communication with one another, and could send messages, hints, and plot hooks back and forth? That might be fun. The weaponsmith from group A could use downtime to forge a sword (or whatever) for the paladin of group B. Heck, we could even go cliche-classic and make a PC from each group into siblings or something.

One tidbit that's terribly interesting to me is that the game-world I'm working on is based on the last campaign I ran for the larger group; wait, that didn't explain it at all. This will require a separate post, no doubt.

Curses, I'm going to have to start categorizing blog entries now. *sigh*

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TODAY'S QUESTION:

Have you ever run multiple campaigns simultaneously for different player-groups, which intertwined or interacted? How deep did it go? And did it work?