When combining worlds, as listed in the previous post, it may be a good idea to read up on information on the world or type of world you are trying to portray. Read a lot as a game master/storyteller/umpire or whatever you want to call it... Knowledge is power!
If one of your players knows more about some of the fantasy world(s) than you do their thoughts may be just ideas that are wrong in your reality in your game or maybe they know too much and you need to change some fundamental themes or concepts in order to make them not think they know all things... making up your own new characters to fill your stories is a good idea... anytime you make up a new character that's plays a major role in the game(s), please think about their history, motives, speech patterns, and other things. In an acting class that I had to take in college for my theater minor, we were usually asked to make up at least 2 pages of background info on each main character we tried to portray so that we could use that to "become" the character. It's useful. If you read novels a lot of background info is known as the author gives it to you. If you watch movies or plays, that info isn't immediately available to the viewer, just as it wouldn't be to a PC playing your RPG... so you need to give them those sorts of ideas and backgrounds, and it is very useful if you do so in "role playing" this through speech intonations, and things... When making up a history think about stuff like maybe what this NPC's regular daily activities include... what sort of stuff would they eat for breakfast? Do they go after cold cereal or do they need gormet ham and eggs served by a maid? What did they do yesterday that may affect their actions today, what about last week. When I used to do a lot of game mastering, I usually made up in depth background stories, more or less as complex as soap opera plots, or star trek plots (space opera is just like soap operas in some ways... just in a different setting)... If I had two main NPCs fighting one another, I'd figure out why, and what they had done up to that point.. when the PCs enter the action in the game, they are really not going to know much of this background info and I needed to bring it to their attention in various ways.. there's a lot of work in doing this background stuff, but it will pay off...
When it comes to doing crossovers like mentioned in the last post, you may want to think about looking at other RPGs too... for instance there is a Star Wars RPG out there... so you may be able to gleen some ideas about it by browsing it at a bookstore or library, and/or buying it yourself...
Most table top rpg and even non-table top rpg characters and items can be used in other rpgs with just a little tweaking. If you know enough about the system(s) involved in the game, you can have multiple books from different systems and use different items or characters from them in the other systems... For instance, I used to use WoD characters in SDC World based games like Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Superspies a lot.. just figure out the conversion rules... in this case, SDC system used HP and SDC to figure character's health. WoD used Dots. After figuring out how many dots were an average amount and how many SDC most normal characters had, I decided to use a 5 to 1 rule.. so 1 dot = roughly 5 SDC... when it came to skills, SDC game was percentage based and WoD is dot based... with 5 dots being almost perfect... so I just did some math and figured that 1 dot = roughly 20%... that made things pretty easy to figure out how to convert. You may use different conversion rules, but this conversion factor seemed to work fine for us.
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