Horde provides a low-level animation playback engine with layers, mixing and additive animation blending.
Any higher level functionality must be programmed by your own, probably with a notion of "what is a character" and "which anims are available", and might be rather specific to your engine.
We implemented a higher level animation framework similar to Unity3D's (see
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/Animation.html) which allows us to play animations in a queue, crossfade them, and so on.
A simple start would be the creation of a "anim component" and keep track of available animations and update their animation times.
I think there is also something similar in the Horde game-engine.