Horde3D

Hey there,
i am currently thinking about how one could implement a special effects system (e.g. a blinking node, a burning node oder perhaps some kinds of particles spawning all around the node) into a game. The main problem i see is that some effects would need to change the shader of the targetnode, others would need to create new geometry or need to at least know a little bit about the underlying geometry and again others dont need anything to work. So how could one unify all this efficently?
I think the nicest way would be to end up with somithink like a single effect baseclass. These effects would then just be applied to the entities. I thought about implementing an effect baseclass and all the other effects will be derived from this class. When applying the effect the effect will request the Horde3D node handle and basic "static" stuff from the entity. From now on i am not that sure how i should handle things. I would call effect->update() during each entity->update(). The shaders etc will only be set once, but in case of particle effects there is a little bit more to do.
What do you think? How would you handle this?