I played my first session of Genesys on Sunday with half of my regular gaming group. We did a sci-fi one shot to test the system and really enjoyed it. They both liked it so much they suggested that we convert our D&D 5E campaign for a test session to see if we'd prefer that. I got to work on converting their characters and it's been going pretty well. With just the materials in the core book and c__beck's Fantasy Handbook , I was able to easily convert the fighter, druid, and paladin. Almost nothing was lost in the transition and I'm very pleased with how quick and faithful the conversion were. But our fourth player is a mystic, 5E's psionic class, and that posed a bit more difficulty - D&D psionics are quite distinct so I didn't want to just make him an arcane spellcaster. I toyed with creating a whole new psionics system to run alongside magic, but decided that wasn't at all necessary. Instead, I simply created a new magic skill and filled in a few spell gaps. Please, give me some feedback!

Teleport and Shape are both good, but Manipulate feels like it's trying to do a bit too much (Charm, Mind Control, Emotional Influence and Illusions, which I broke into two separate things). I feel all of these need a clearer "This spell does this at this difficulty" base to build off of. Take "Shape" for instance, you note that it creates difficult terrain, but how much of it? Is it short range? Engaged range on caster? How difficult is it to cast? Nail down those specifics and then difficulty upgrades are easy to craft.

I do like Psionics though, and is something I might use to replace Divine as I've never liked it. That said, Psionics to me always feels better "inner mental strength" than sheer intelligence. Presence or Willpower feel like much better fits, and don't double dip on Arcana being Intellect. Both also reinforce a nice mental manipulation theme through skill synergy.

I ended up doing something very similar for my psioniphiles that I'm trying to sway from the other fantasy RPGs to Genesys, but like Cyvaris, I opted for Presence instead of Intellect for the same reasons.

I would also still leave the verbal and gestures in with Psionics, but maybe have Talents that allow them to eliminate those things or introduce small bonuses like those to the other skills you want to include in your game so that Psionics doesn't have a clear head-start over the others.

I don't necessarily feel like Manipulate is covering too much mechanically, but as you mention the Curse action in your fluff, I'd need the book in front of me to comment more on how much of that is overlap or could be adapted to expanding Curse for more uses.

I like Shape and it covers a lot of iconic spells from That Other Game that had a small AoE with various effects that Genesys didn't touch on with the core rules. I would probably leave Precision out to make this the more "broad strokes" spell action, but I'm also a stingy GM that loves to make my players squirm with options that could potentially be turned against them. I'd also either find a wider range of damage options than just Burn, or eliminate Burn from the options. Lastly, for Shape, I would rename Freeze to Encase or something like that to avoid the connotations of Freeze related to ice block scenarios.

Teleport I feel like should also be accessible to Arcane, and possibly limited applications to Primal, but definitely Arcane. Zipping instantly from place to place is a pretty iconic arcane move. I'll have to sit on the rest of it for a while as I'm always hesitant to allow hostile teleportation since I've just seen so much abuse of that ability before.

All in all, I really like the ideas here and will very likely be stealing bits and pieces for my own stuff, so thank you very much for putting it out there.

I do note range and radius near the end of the shape description - medium range and short radius. I do need to clear it up, and at some point in editing I guess I deleted that creating difficult terrain is an easy check.

I could see psionics as presence or willpower as well. Presence rounds out the magic skills nicely. I'm gonna stick with intellect for now as it fits the character being adapted but going forward I may switch to presence.

I kept teleport from arcane for balance reasons.

They seem to step on each other a lot more than the spells in the core book, you have effectively blended Attack and Curse in three different ways then added teleportation to the mix.

I would remove the ability to attack with teleport, as that is just a narrative description of using the Attack Spell.

I think the Teleport spell also needs a 3 Difficulty “change the range to planetary scale” effect. You could also impose a restriction on the Silhouette of the object teleported to 1, giving you the opportunity to add an “increase Silhouette” effect, ultimately allowing a player to teleport a bus full of people

Shape is cool, but a Burn Rating needs two numbers not one. It needs a base damage to deal, but also the number of rounds it deals that damage for. You may be better changing it to Blast so that it’s a single instance of damage and can’t get out of hand (imagine dealing 5 damage to everything in an encounter every turn... that’s just crazy!)

Manipulation is actually the one I have the most problems with. The basic effect does not align with most of the upgrades, in particular Illusion and Mind Control which both don’t need you to move the target at all.

My suggestion would be to break it up. The attack spell already has a way to move your target (called Manipulate), if you want psionic characters to be able to do that without causing damage then make a talent for that:

Psionic Manipulation

Tier 2, Ranked: No.

Before a psionic casts the Attack Spell with the Manipulate additional effect they may choose to forgo causing damage. If they choose not to cause damage with the spell then reduce the difficulty of the check by 1.

With that out of the way you can focus your new spell on the Manipulation of minds.

I definitely need to clean up manipulation, I'm not very happy with it. And adding a planetary scale to teleport is a great idea.