I've made some fairly significant additions to Hammercalled today, which should be of some interest to anyone following along.
First, there is now a rudimentary system for applying bonuses to characters via Tools during combat. This takes the place of an attack, and gives a status effect that boosts allies. Right now there are just three; one that gives a +5 bonus to the floating Adrenalin that can be used to boost any action in combat, one that allows characters to gain any location status effects that another character has, and one that gives a defense bonus. I'm looking forward to seeing these in play.
New gear qualities and talents have been added to take advantage of these status effects.
Instead of having a fixed duration, after each character's Priority they must roll to see if they can maintain the positive status effects that have been applied to them.
Second, the attribute Charm has been renamed to Presence to reflect its role better, and the Stamina and Wound systems have been overhauled. For people who are bothered by having an outdated character sheet, a new character sheet is available that includes the change to Presence from Charm.
Stamina now starts at a base value of 5, and gains a bonus equal to the tens-place of a character's Brawn, Toughness, and Presence (which, as a reminder, doubles as a measure of both interpersonal influence and willpower). Wounds still start at a base value of 5, and gain a bonus equal to the tens-place of the character's Toughness, instead of the character's lowest attribute.
This means that we should see slightly higher Wounds (not across the board, just on high Toughness characters), and Stamina roughly where it was before. Stamina might actually be a little lower, but that's not the end of the world, because it is now much easier to improve during play.
Rules for NPC minions have now been officially added, though I wouldn't call them fully finished. It is an important step of bringing the game into line with the way it's been played in my test groups, however.
The character creation example has been improved, and should now reflect the actual process of character creation (there were a couple false-starts with references to talents and the old Advances system).
Overall, these changes bring some improvements that the system's been waiting for. It should make it possible to play support characters (though there definitely needs to be more content fleshed out for them in the rules), and I feel that overall it reflects an incremental improvement.
As always, you can find the latest version of Hammercalled through this link.