What I've decided to do with Hammercalled as I return to it is to go back to a focus on what I think makes it interesting.
One of the things that makes Hammercalled work differently than most other roleplaying games it directly competes with is that it's positively constructed during play in many of its mechanics.
Your job as a player or Game Master before each session is to go in and make sure that characters have skills and items that let them interface with the world, but there are few mechanics that lock you into things. As a result, you can be strictly narrative about things like magic existing in the setting, making skills and gear that lead toward an outcome.
One of the things that I want to do is to start pushing away from some of the "hardcoded" elements in the system. One of them is the health system, which is something of a pain in the butt.
Right now health takes the form of stamina (quick healing injuries) and wounds (penalty bearing long-term injuries) and at least in Hammercalled Core there's a destiny pool that allows narrative effects, but the whole game feels like narrative effects (e.g. you can have "I am able to network effectively" as a skill and use that to call on a contact), so I don't think that it works as well as it ought to and should be switched over to a new system that is more flexible.
What I'm thinking is a variant of the Adrenalin system in Segira:
The new core would have Health, which is slightly more generous than the current Stamina or Wound pools by itself, and Energy, which is a Destiny/Stamina analogue.
When a character's Health or Energy drops below half, they enter a Bloodied or Winded state respectively. This comes with some natural consequences, but it can also interface with other elements of the system. Gear and Talents could respond to certain states and provide situational bonuses, and it could enable special maneuvers in combat.
It also simplifies the bookkeeping quite a bit, since the current system has three pools and we're consolidating to two. That doesn't seem tremendously big, but one of the things that has been an issue is how damage works and distinguishing damage to stamina, and trauma.
I think it also works better than the Adrenalin system in Segira, which felt like an extra selective power boost, because now damage can be split between Health and Energy (e.g. nonlethal attacks), and that can interact with the Bloodied and Winded mechanics as well.
In addition, the Energy pool could tie in to expenditure by Gear (e.g. expend X energy to activate this item), which would still have been possible with the Adrenalin system though it was never used in that fashion.
The new system should be complexity neutral, with a more or less streamlined approach to some of these things. It allows the creation of gear and talents that interact with the Bloodied and Winded statuses as well, which could bear great dividends for certain character concepts (e.g. flying into a rage when injured).
