Remember I posted about premade settings for Universalis a few years back? I think you did a really good one with Blood Red Sands! I'm sure you've thought a lot about this, but I'll mention it anyway: it seems like there's a lot of potential for other settings for BRS and other Universalisy games like BRS. I think a Lovecraftian setting would work well, for instance.
I'm wondering if there's a way to do a game like BRS, except where the players play their characters most of the time, adventuring kind of like in a regular RPG, but with a "script" driven by dice and tables, like it is in BRS. This doesn't have to be "random encounters," because the tables can involve story line developments. Chapters, ordeals, sagas, and epics could be just one of many possible story line structures. Players could determine randomly when certain parts of the story unfold.
Bill
Rob Donoghue's Hex Bones might be useful for generating storyline: http://www.logrus.com/~moose/page1/files/hexbones.pdf if you assign concrete actions to them. There could be time track so that betrayals could be scheduled several turns after they come up.
Bill