[dataweaver]

I've got a house ruled variation on Realm Magic that attempts to bring back 3e's style of Psionics in a 4e context: for those not familiar with 3e Psionics, each kind of psi had a core advantage that determined how powerful you are (so Telepathy 3 is more powerful than Telepathy 1) and a series of skills that determined what you can do with it (so skill in Telesend let you use your Telepathy to send messages into other peoples' heads and skill in Telereceive let you read someone else's mind).

For my house rule, I take the basic framework for Realm Magic, but instead of breaking the Realm up into levels based on what you can do with it, I treat the levels as straight additions to the intensity, range, area, or duration of a given effect. You determine which effects you can attempt based on which skills you have, and you price the Advantage the same way you would price a Talent: usually, a Realm costs 10/level; but if it has an exceptionally narrow set of associated skills, it's 5/level, and if it has an exceptionally broad set of skills, it's 15/level. For more flexibility, you can assign defaults to the psi skills: traditionally, the Danger Sense skill for ESP and the Empathy skill for Telepathy have IQ-based defaults; but there's also the possibility of some psionic skills defaulting to other ones, forming “default trees” analogous to standard Magic's prerequisite trees.

Something like this could be used as the core advantages of a Sorcery-like variation on 4e's Psionic Powers. Note that using the Realm Magic rules for creating an effect tend to be slower and more energy-intensive than using the powers found in Psionic Powers; so there would still be a benefit to buying the Psionic Abilities. But with this Realm Magic variant as the core advantages of the various Psionic Powers, you'd be able to learn and use each ability's Skill before investing character points in the ability's Advantage.