I once wrote the Mexican Mafia/Latino Cartel mast rigging game (it's a system of cultural interaction for police, military, mercenaries, criminals, and professional labor - we'd call it blue collar - in Latin areas) as Gilligan, from Gilligan's Island, as a reference to Treasure Island, a book about privateers and pirates, a common mast rigging game classic use to teach children how mutual and fair interactions work.
It was not well received. 
For an experimental quick character gen, consider a dual-class system, with different categories for each class, although the classes would be the same in a congruous faction. (A medium would be the same as a mage, for example, but medium would perhaps be a 'genome' category, perhaps for a Nightfolk, versus mage, that would be a 'pathway' category, for a pre-creation origin). So you could mix and match for a unique result each time, if you get my meaning. A mage medium would be a mentalist, or a thief (Kender?) gunner would be a bandit.
I'm using a system I've devised for my little global criminal fiefdom project to drive the plot forward with a minimum of staff help, aside from arbitration and the staff working as an 'off switch' to potentially world destroying player schemes.
You allow them to pool some sort of IC token made from AP of a various sort, not necessarily number of scenes but perhaps victories, contributions to the game, recruitment of players, and put it towards building their own niche on the game to run the elements that would traditionally require staff involvement.
I've taken a stat that increases once per scene for each player, in one of six categories, and allowed players to build IC landmarks with it for their own personal holdings, which they can then put into public works for increasing amounts of NPC control. My game requires shifting alliances that are all beholden to a leadership council of active or possibly inactive factional leaderships, with non-PC forces (government forces not beholden to the PCs via corruption), so I've used this particular system. For your idea, you may wish to form something akin to mineral staking outfits for artifact hunting, and factional territory reclamation for your ruin exploration.
The other two IC challenges, city politics (faction) and gangs vs. vigilantes (low level player politics), would fit into this well, particularly if you don't rigidly wire them into the same thing. You could be in the same faction on a larger scale, but conflict at a lower scale. That would make the kinds of conflict more fluid.
Years ago I read a definition, on a writer's website, of science fiction being termed as 'man vs. science' as the primary conflict, if you trust highschool equivalency literary theory in regards to the lever point of a story. Not necessarily something like Terminator (although it counts), with humans battling machines, but more in the vein of sapience's interaction with technology, even sapient technology, as defined over at Megaman MUSH (which opens up the meta-issue, what is the nature of sapience?)