This might just be me grasping at straws, but would it make sense to set the RP in the middle of a conflict, with the players being on opposing sides? It just seems like (from my experience) we always try to build up to this big events, and then loose interest/steam before they actually happen. Actually having a game-within-The Blackfyre Rebellion, or some-such war might be fairly interesting. That said I'm no GM, and am still fairly new to this, so maybe I'm missing something here. 

Just one man's humble opinion, anyways.

-EDIT- just realized that I've literally just described option 2. So I vote option 2.