Council of the Harpers

I have all the 3/3.5 ed Forgotten Realms source books and occasionally I wish I could run a larger more epic campaign in the Realms.  I've always been something at a loss as to what to do as a lot of my players have different interests.  Finally think I have a solution (not that I will get to try it anytime soon):  the Council of the Harpers.

The idea is that the Harpers are a continent spanning organization that actively fights evil and injustice.  The players act as both the leaders and agents in the Harpers.  So the DM throws together several different problems throughout Faerun and the players then choose what they want to investigate.  This gives both the players and the DM some choices on what to do and where to go.  Since the DM creates the items to investigate he/she can find some interesting hooks to bait the players in but in the end the players make the call what they want to do.  Do they want to follow up on a previous adventure and push that story along or would they rather explore somewhere else?  This can also allow multiple groups (who can also be at different levels) to be operating simultaneously in Faerun.  The workload here would be pretty high for a DM but it gives a ton of flexibility to people coming and going and allows for greater exploration of the world.

Another side benefit is that it allows the DM to create greater worldspanning events and geopolitical change even if most of the players are more interested in standard dungeon crawls.