The DamageTrack is an attempt to reconcile both fatigue and HP damage to one track, not two separate ones, and take care of a lot of the wierdness that results from there being two tracks.

Every character has a damage track.  It is a number of boxes in a line, equal to the character's (HT+ST)/1.5, round to the nearest integer, and a space to record overflow.  Overflow is a sequence of numbers, separated by slashes.  Your WoundPenalty is equal to the number of slashes in your overflow.  You WoundPenalty is a penalty to all actions due to your wounded state.

Burning Energy

 Whenever a character takes fatigue, place a mark on one side of the track, off an unmarked box.  If there are no boxes left, simply add it to the overflow tally.

Whenever a character takes a wound (i.e. 1 HP of damage), place a mark on the other side of the track, off a box.  If there are no boxes left, simply add it to the overflow tally.

If your character takes perminant damage in some way (like a blood charm or whatnot) shade out those boxes in a special color.  The boxes are still there, they're just perminatly damaged (for damages with other odd durations, this can also be used).  Push other kinds of damage onto the overflow tally, if necessary...this kind of damage is assumed to be rare.

When the overflow tally reaches your total number of boxes, record that number and place a slash after it.  After that, place a slash after 1/2 your number of boxes, round up and then round down alternating.

Regaining Energy

 If you recover fatigue (say, from resting) and the tally is zero, erase a mark from the fatigue side of the track.  If there are no marks on the fatigue side of the track, you cannot heal any more from this meathod now--any excess is lost.

If you recover fatigue and the tally is nonzero, reduce the tally by one and convert a fatigue point to a damage point.  If you have no marks on the fatigue side of the track, you cannot heal any more from this meathod now--any excess is lost.

If you do something that causes you to recover wounds, reduce the tally by that amount.  If you are healing more than is in the tally, erase a number of marks on the wound side of the track.  If there are no marks on the wound side of the track, you cannot get any better this way--the excess is lost.

Death and Contiousness

 If the tally is nonzero, and you have lost a box since becoming conscious, make a consciousness roll (against HT) every round.

If your WoundPenatly has increased since you last made a death check, make a death check (againt HT) at your new penatly.  Note that this is a maximum of one death check per round, regardless of how much your would penalty has increased.

If your WoundPenalty is your HT or greater, you are just dead.  If your wound penalty is twice your HT or greater, you are hamburger/chunky salsa/otherwise obliterated.

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Durability

 Each rank of durability adds to HT for the purposes of determining how many boxes a character has.

Each rank of durability also reduces your WoundPenalty by one.  Note that it does not act as a bonus to death checks, it simply prevents you from making many of them by keeping your wound penalty at zero for up to lots and lots of damage.  As a special bonus effect, a net wound "bonus" is added to all your uncontiousness checks...so if your WoundPenalty would be 5 and you have 10 ranks of durability, you're rolling at HT+5 not to pass out.

Strain

 Each adept has a strain guage.  It has four slots.  When all four slots are full, an additional point of strain will
cause the guage to roll over to empty and give the adept one wound (i.e. one point of damage).  If the adept has no boxes of damage, then anything that would restore a wound instead takes the strain guage to zero.  Do the smart thing when taking lots of strain and convert it to wounds in a 5:1 ratio.

Perminant Strain

 ...is now pretty redundant.  Make anything that cost a perminant strain point now do some perminant damage--a 1/3 box of damage before drawing the gauge is nice.  Alternately, make it so the adept can never heal to better than all boxes empty and a strain tally of their permastrain.

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Features/bugs:

 WoundPenalty is new...it's based on the penalty to uncontiousness and recovery rolls.  It seems natural to extend this to other actions as well, so we don't have the "I'm just fine" walking corpse who would be rolling to fall unconscious on a 3 standing back from combat and plinking away or traveling at no difficulties once the smelling salts have woken him up.  Alternately, it could just be a reduction in HT, in HT or ST, or to all stats (leaving active defences alone, but penalizing all other rolls).  It might also be the case that Adepts cannot meditate with a nonzero wound penalty, like old ED adepts could not meditate when they had wounds.

General asumption that "succeed N checks in a row" is roughly equivalent to "succeed in a check - N"--can be removed trivially.

People have slightly more HP for wounds (and thus take more before death checks), but less combined, and the effect of racial ST on HP is notably altered.  Number of boxes for average:

* windling: 10 (hmm...), tuffness 1

* human or elf: 13, tuffness 2

* dwarf: 16 (HT 12 + ST 12), tuffness 2

* ork: 18, tuffness 3

* troll: 21, tuffness 4, plus racial stuff.

(More earthdawny, but exagerating tuffness a bit would make the wounds more noticably different from fatigue.  This would fall under damage mechanics.  Making boxes depend more on ST than fatigue respreads the races (say 2xST+HT/2.5, for windling 6, human/elf 12, dwarf 14, ork 17, troll 20) makes the spread resemble HP more, but HT becomes a really unfavored attribute, and you get the "mages are stung and unhealthy" problem again.  Adding Wounds, with a capital Wuh, off of HTxlinear scale increases it's importance again...but now we're getting into heavy hypotheticals and serious system ballance-and-counterballance)

If you're at negative HP (i.e. you have an overflow tally), spending fatigue is always wounding.  Resting doesn't really help that much, since it doesn't reduce the number of boxes of damage, just the overflow tally.  This is, in fact, what old ED adepts had, and they were also the only ones likely to build up a large overflow tally and still be moving.  Normal people aren't usually running around at -ST HP, or whatnot, and are probably quite weak and need to avoid pushing themselves...because what was simply fatiguing before is now wounding?

Once a person is Just Dead, it doesn't take a whole lot to turn them into hamburger.

Reducing WoundPenatly by one per rank is really pumped, but it's the thing that does most of the gruntwork of Durability...making you not die and keep moving at obscene levels of damage.  Balance with the amount of damage in the world for reasonable effects.  Possible modifications include:

* durability reduces the wound penalty by some fraction of rank, probably 2/3, 1/2, or 1/3.

* the "wound bonus" to unconsciousness checks is doubled or trippled or something.

* if the WoundPenalty would be less than zero, you don't even have to roll for unconsciousness...you just succeed. (this is pretty much what old ED adepts had?  This is actually pretty damned scary.)

Strain is like wounding damage, not fatigue.  Changing this is trivial, but the more lasting effect is what ED had.

A different number of slots on the strain gauge (I sort of like 4, it's like the madness mechanic) makes Strain more or less heinous.  Also, no rolling for strain.  Yay reductions in rolling.