Maybe the most successful kind of situation would simply be using the epic action to provide a simple backdrop and some story drivers for a differently themed lower level story. The swashbuckling intrigue game plays well at paragon for instance, but setting it against the War of the Gods being played out in epic should work pretty well. The epic action could be fairly distant and just serve to explain some of what happens in the intrigue game.
That's more or less what I see as the basis for a workable model. The question that keeps drawing me back, though, is sort of this: "What's the advantage of a crossover event compared to the more tightly themed and personalized content that's the default?" The stakes are higher, but also more generic; when the elemental incursion happens, it really doesn't matter if it's another PC group or a bunch of NPCs that were the trigger, you're still dealing with someone else's mess instead of chasing your own ambitions. I think that's an unfortunate trade-off.
Having run my original setting through a whole slew of cycles of different levels of play and parallel groups I find you can do it. One easy approach is just the 'surviving the storm' theme where some heroic adventurers try to keep their town or whatnot in one piece while the rest of the world falls apart around them.
The trouble I have with that focus is that it cannibalizes themes, turning them into "survive the apocalypse." I realize I'm emphasizing the importance of theme and subgenre here a lot, but basically the games I run are things the players have voted on. When I run a swashbuckler, that's because the group decided that option (out of the 20 or so confronted with) appealed to them the most, in part influenced by a fondness for Assassin's Creed, I figure. Turning that game into a "brace against Armageddon" game would be a bait-and-switch.
Ah, I see the problem. You're mixing up your memes:
- Demons employ courtesans, in their court intrigues (succubi)
- Devils engage in whitty banter, mid-duel or at parties
(succubi are devils now)
I've considered this, actually, but all the best reasons I come up with for infernal intrigues playing out in the courts that PCs move in, particularly those that are playing a subtle game, instead of just marching a legion into the throne room and taking command, don't really require world-shaking epic events. They have a fascinating dynamic when the infernal types are bound by some rules to "play by the letter of the law" or cannot reveal themselves openly, and that plays at least as well in a stable world than one on the brink.
- Aberrations and zombies are plagues; the sort of thing that strikes fear deep in the heart of any medieval city-dweller
- Fire elementals are merely the personification of another medieval city-dwellers' primal fear; fire
To my ear those come across more like staging methods to set up an urban terror event than urban swashbucklers; there's the city element, but there's terror instead of panache. And an urban apocalypse is a decent idea for a game in its own right -- but if the players are signed up for a swashbuckler, they may very well prefer that to an urban apocalypse.
So buckle that swash, whydoncha.
It's already being buckled quite effectively, sans distractions. That's kind of the trouble I'm getting at: the way that Big Stakes Based On Some Other Group's Deeds tend to move the action away from the content that's personalized for
this group.
