To preface the ideas I'm about to explain here, I've never really been a fan of the PCs stacking up on health potions in town that they'll then start chucking down when shit hits the fan, especially since my interests lean more towards the grim fantasy side of things akin to such things as Dark Souls or Darkest Dungeon.
Sure it's one way to drain their money and maybe you can't get someone back up if their wounds are too massive and different sorts of OSR games likely have their own ways of making healing potions not trivialize the damage the PCs have taken when they can just uncork a potion at the end of combat and be back in fighting shape, but this here is what I had been toying with some years back while still doing some world building for a setting that's by now long abandoned.
Bloodstones
Small red and dimly glistening objects that are smooth to the touch yet show numerous small edges along their surface, almost like ripples running through them. Some may even have pockets of air or other materials trapped inside them.
Bloodstones as they've been named, or just red stones for some, have been found in sizes varying between ones you could fit on your fingertip to those sizing up to a human head, as well as in different shapes from clumps of all sorts to what has been described as "a small pond or puddle that's frozen solid".
The stones haven't been reliably identified, some claiming them to be an organic living material while others claim them to be nothing but pigmented glass, but that hasn't stopped various craftsmen working this amber-like substance into all sorts of vanity items. There's even records of such stones being used for beautiful mosaic windows when large enough chunks have been found.
For adventurers though, the most notable feature of these stones is how they act when applied to exposed flesh. The stone slowly creeps into the wound and crystallizes, making them an ideal alternative for bandages and other treatments that might take too long to apply while out in the wilderness or deep in a dungeon. Bloodstones can also be found from time to time at sites of violence or death which makes them both a blessing on a long delve as well as a warning for those in the know.
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Mechanically speaking bloodstones are what I had in mind for replacing health potions in my games. An excessive use of the stones would leave the adventurer's body riddled with red crystallized clusters, each one marking a use of a "health potion" that the person had taken. Maybe some less reputable individuals would even go after such people in hopes of getting their hands on a stash of them that they could harvest from the body.
The stones I had intended to work more as "stored up hp" than straight up potion replacements though, you would roll the amount of hp stored in the stone which in turn would give you an idea of it's size. Larger stones equal more stored up hp which could be used either all at once or in smaller segments, but the stone would always attempt to heal you to full hp regardless of it's size. Smart adventurers might even keep small bloodstone shards sewn under their clothes to quickly heal up any wounds taken during a fight.
These stones could be found on or near dead bodies in the wilderness or dungeons, formed from their blood. Only human bodies produced bloodstones upon death, and the formation of them was slow as the blood needed to be left undisturbed as it crystallized so any wild animals or monsters that would use them for food would disturb the process and bloodstones could really be only found where people had been long dead.
Looking back on this idea now and having slightly re-written and refined it here I would probably still allow potions in my worlds, but I'm intrigued by the idea of only allowing them to work as something that would numb you from the pain and thus give you temporary hp, while the bloodstones or proper medical aid, rest and healing magic would be the only options for regaining lost hit points.
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