Genesys, Now What?

Where Do I Begin?
Wondering what to do with the Genesys generic game using Fantasy Flight's Narrative Dice System (also used in FFG's Star Wars RPG). The Narrative Dice System (NDS) is a dice pool mechanic using proprietary Genesys dice with special symbols in place of numbers. There are good dice which have successes and advantages on them and bad dice with failures and complications on them. Failures cancel out successes and complications cancel advantages, etc. The tendency of the dice is to produce failures with advantage and successes with complication results. How the referee (and players) narrate the dice result is where the system earns its name. Obviously skill at improvisation is required.
Friends I regularly play with enjoy the NDS and I am wondering how to apply it to a camapign/setting I can run.  Genesys is a tool-box book requiring either a separate published setting volume (none are currently available, but there are several probably on FFG's horizon) or some creative work on the part of the referee. When I call Genesys a tool-box, I am comparing what you get to a hammer, nails, saw, measuring device - not what comes in a box from IKEA. IKEA includes everything you need to build your project. Genesys includes the tools to help you build your project, but very little of the raw material. You have to add to Genesys. It isn't complete as is. If this is reminding you of White Box, it should. Like White Box, the referee will need to fill in the gaps.
Genesys comes with outlines for six possible settings - fantasy, steampunk, weird war, modern day, science fiction and space opera. None are usable out-of-the-book. To have a workable game setting, the referee needs to either borrow one, from literary or game sources, or create something from imagination.
A few literary settings immediately jump to mind when I think of adaptation. The Genesys NDS does heroic story-telling fairly well as long as the group is motivated by the setting and includes some players who are good at improvisation. The system supports magic use, but the rules as written need considerable work. The magic section is really just a few suggestions regarding how you might do magic in Genesys and actual game deployment of magic will require the referee to build their own system. Magic, using the NDS, will require creativity on the part of the players and the referee who assigns the number of difficulty dice and interprets the final dice outcome. Magic in the book is divided into arcane, divine and primal, but this can be adjusted and added to. The list of actual spell effects is rather small and many of the staples of magic are left out entirely (to be added by the referee, I presume). There is no real guidance on how spells are learned, how many spells a PC may know, or how to use the advantages and complications which can be rolled with the spell use dice pool. Magic systems are often different across settings and a distinguishing feature which brings much character to the setting itself. It therefore deserves careful consideration.
Player characters in Genesys and the NDS games are fairly robust even at roll-up and character death isn't much of a threat. The PC can pass out from strain or wounds, but death usually requires multiple critical hits and you generally pass out before that can happen. Therefore the NDS seems to produce games of cinematic daring do and death defying heroics often attempted against long odds. Failure often results in capture, but rarely PC death and there is generally an opportunity to redeem the situation. Tension can run high as complications build and characters start to reach the limits of their ability to withstand strain and hurt, but real fear seems difficult to achieve.
So what to do with Genesys? I have given some thought to Tolkien's Middle Earth, just because it is always close to the first thing I think about. I don't believe Genesys is the fit I would like for Middle Earth however, mostly because I tend to think of Middle Earth as a more dark, gritty, adventure horror kind of setting. Genesys characters seem a bit overpowered for my Middle Earth.
My own long-standing White Box setting of Dreadmoor is even darker, so I set that idea aside, along with Howard's Hyperborea from which I have drawn heavily for Dreadmoor inspiration. The Lankhmar stories of Fritz Leiber are among my favorites and although they are not well known among the target group of players, I suspect Genesys could do a good job with Lankhmar. A friend from another gaming group recently picked up a copy of Thieves' World Adventure Pack (more on TW in a future post) published by Chaosium and I think that that shared setting might fit with Genesys. The sword and planet settings might also work well.