The Comm Guild Maelstrom's Edge

Last week we showed the Epirian Master Handler for the first time. This week, we'll share a few more snippets of information about the model.

The master handler has been sculpted, but is still quite a while away from production as it will be in a plastic tool with some other models that are still in development. As such, everything is subject to change until the metal is cut and the rules cards printed.

The model can be equipped with a claw arm, or two drone-type weapons, along with sensor array and missile pod options. We are playtesting rules for it at the moment. The arms can be posed dynamically, with the robotic arm elements having two ball joints and one flat joint, allowing a huge range of motion in the arm/weapon direction, while maintaining the cool, heavy look of the model.

These dark blue-grey Karists are one of our studio army colourschemes, so we'll have a fair few units to show in this scheme over time. The muted colour palette along with the great spot colours on the weapons and contrasting red on the faceplate immediately made this one of our favourites. The only points against it are that the dark scheme requires a lot of light to photograph well, so in full scale battle shots it can be quite challenging to capture! We usually have these guys with us at Salute if you ever want to see them in the flesh though!

After last week's in depth walkthrough of the terrain sprue, we thought we'd take things back a notch and just share a nice simple image of a storage container built using components from the sprue along with a tiny bit of filler card.

Simple, and effective battlefield terrain with minimal effort.

For our third week of converted Angel images in a row, here's a great lunging Angel from Dakka user SexierThanYou13

There's also a great Kaddar Nova that has massive presence when mounted on some cork

Along with some nicely posed Scarecrows

The Comm Guild's community spotlight focuses on sharing something from the Maelstrom's Edge community each week, if you have anything you'd like to get in to the queue, please get in touch with us via the Maelstrom's Edge website

Crisis Point is an hour long Maelstrom's Edge audiobook by Stephen Gaskell.

Crisis Point highlights the challenges facing the Epirian officer Vasar Kopak, a man responsible for the security of an escape route from the Edge threatened Merida system, as a large fleet of refugees who have gathered under the banner of the Broken try to flee the inevitability of the Maelstrom.

Unlike many of our wider universe stories, this story deals directly with two factions - the Broken and Epirians, and features a fair amount of space-based drone control along with some heavy action.

If you've not got it already, then give Crisis Point a listen! All of our audiobooks are professionally produced and are provided in DRM free MP3 format for download or easy listening in your browser on any device.

One of our favourite pieces of terrain in the studio collection is this refinery by 3T studios, made using foamcore and the Maelstrom's Edge Terrain Sprue

When assembling it, they were kind enough to take a whole bunch of WIP photos, so we can show you just how simple it is to create impressive buildings like this.

Everything begins with the basic shapes. Sketch them out on paper or however you like, cut out of foamcore, and then glue them together on a hard base

Next, the whole structure gets a light coat of texturing. Spackle/plaster works well for this, and it is also used to break up the texture on the base as well

Now, the core structure of the building is fully painted, so that if anything breaks off or peels away later, there wont be bright white material showing underneath

Now the fun part, components from the Maelstrom's Edge Terrain Sprue are affixed to the building, often using a plasticard backing so that they cleanly fit on the various faces of the structure.

Here's just how much detail can be created from the terrain sprue (and a bit more from a second sprue) and some strips of thin plasticard, along with a straw and a chunk of the frame of the terrain sprue as well for piping.

Once all those loose components are superglued on to the base building, we end up with the final structure

Grab a copy of the terrain sprue today and try it yourself!

In today's community spotlight, we wanted to share the lovely work that Keltikhoa did on their project blog. From metallic Karists to this awesome Angel conversion:

and in keeping with Monday's Minnow spotlight, here's their Angel Minnow colourscheme:

The Comm Guild's community spotlight focuses on sharing something from the Maelstrom's Edge community each week, if you have anything you'd like to get in to the queue, please get in touch with us via the Maelstrom's Edge website

We are proud to present the sequel to Transit... Fracture!

Fracture follows directly on from the end of Transit, and once again is a one hour long audiobook by Stephen Gaskell which serves as a broad introduction to the Maelstrom's Edge universe. Fracture continues to follow Kelvin as he and his family go to great lengths to try and escape their Maelstrom threatened world.

We've made the first 5 minutes of Fracture available here for preview.

Fracture can be purchased at the Maelstrom's Edge website.

As with all of our audiobooks, the pace of narration is deliberately designed to work well for listening to when you are either painting or driving. Painting our models is a massively enjoyable part of the hobby for us, but painting while enveloping ourselves in the universe with an audiobook makes things even better.

If you've got a long commute, or want to take your relaxation to the next level when painting, please do check out some of the Maelstrom's Edge audiobooks.

In our inaugural community spotlight, we wanted to share pezzapoo's great overview video showing the fully painted contents of his Maelstrom's Edge: Battle for Zycanthus box set, along with his general thoughts on the set, assembly process and everything Maelstrom's Edge.

The Comm Guild's community spotlight focuses on sharing something from the Maelstrom's Edge community each week, if you have anything you'd like to get in to the queue, please get in touch with us via the Maelstrom's Edge website

One thing that slipped a lot of people's notice was that we now have a very detailed game walkthrough document up at the maelstrom's edge website.

It is also available in PDF format for reading on a tablet or phone offline, or printing out.

The guide covers all major parts of the gameplay of Maelstrom's Edge, from setting up, to the phases of a turn, suppression and beyond. Even if you are very familiar with Maelstrom's Edge, we still recommend having a read through of the document as it could always give clarity on things that you want to know more about.

In other news, the Maelstrom's Edge homepage has had an update. We will continue to update content on the website, but the homepage was very overdue for some tweaking. One fun thing of note on there is this video:

The above was made for internal use only, but we do like the narration on it, so we'd thought we'd share for a while. The video is the one that we made to show off the basic concept of Maelstrom's Edge to the many third party authors who have written for us. That compilation is currently scheduled for release in February, though we'll likely release at least one story from it for free on here before then.

Today is also the last day of the discounted expansion sprue before we start widely promoting it, so if you are one of our core followers, be sure to grab it before the 22nd!

The final piece of the puzzle for the expansion sprue release is now available for download.

Simple visit the Unit Lists section of the Maelstrom's Edge website to see all updated unit cards.

If you just want to grab a high resolution copy of all cards, you can also download them directly in one big zip file. We plan to get these cards in to print before Adepticon next Spring, but there are a few more yet to come between now and then if our production stays on track!

You may note that a Subjugator bot is an option for the Epirian Contractor Suppression Team. The Subjagator is a scarecrow that is based around close range crowd control, and can be built from two scarecrow sprues as follows:

It uses one normal scarecrow sprue, and then the Clingfire from a second sprue, so building a Subjugator will still leave enough spare parts for a normal Scarecrow with Chemtek sprayer to be built.

Tuesday and Wednesday's free PDF army books are great for building a force and learning the rules, but when it comes to playing the game, nothing beats having a handy reference sheet nearby.

We've updated our reference sheets to include all the latest units, weapons and rules for both the Karists and Epirians. Now you can download them right here:

Karist Quick Reference Sheets

Epirian Quick Reference Sheets

We look forward to hearing how the Karist Praetorians fare in battle against a fully equipped Epirian Contractor Suppression Team!

As many of you may have noticed, we've been a little bit quiet in terms of public content since we attended Salute 2016. A good chunk of the core team at Spiral Arm Studios was commissioned to work on some very interesting things in a business to business deal with a third party. While we would normally have refused so that we could keep strong focus on building Maelstrom's Edge, the bribery was simply too convincing, with the compensation enough to fully fund Maelstrom's Edge development at a greater pace through to the end of 2020, so we've suddenly got even more stuff in the pipeline! Gearing up for that extra production took a bit of time, but things are well under way now, and we'll be sharing a bit more of our in development work as time goes on so that everyone can see what they have to look forward to.

In addition to the above, JP, the guy who was working hard to build our community channels, got poached by another games company, and since this happened while our focus was elsewhere on the b2b stuff we did not have the capacity to immediately drop someone else into his place. He was doing a great job and had a lot of smart initiatives in place, and from his work we've now got a wider communication infrastructure in place (centred around this blog) ensuring that we can keep feeding out news and content on a regular basis, bringing in a wide range of content writers to keep things fresh and interesting. As always, we are very happy to share community generated content as well, and we'll be releasing some tools and information to help people dip their toes even further into the Maelstrom's Edge universe over the coming months.

We are celebrating the launch of this blog with the release of our next set of models. This coming week sees the release of the Maelstrom's Edge expansion sprue, as detailed a couple of months ago. This sprue is packed with parts to allow you to build Epirian Contractor Suppression Teams, Karist Praetorians equipped with Cybel Glaives, Cybel Mine equipped Shadow Walkers, Karist Trooper Assault Squads, and loads of new detailing elements like new arm poses, grenades, and more. Here's a sneak preview of the contents of the sprue, broken down by faction (Pink=Karist, Blue=Epirian):



Over this week and next, we'll be releasing loads of new content to support the expansion sprue. Including but not limited to, new unit cards (in digital form), new faction summary sheets, free army books for the Karists and Epirians detailing the new units and weaponry available to each, and plenty of new model photos.

The expansion sprue will go sale tomorrow - Aug 15th in an unspecified timezone, on the Maelstrom's Edge web store. For one week, we'll be offering it at a discounted price as a thank you to all of our loyal supporters, so make sure you grab your discounted sprue before the 22nd Aug! We'll then be bringing out bundles of sprues to allow individual units to be purchased with all necessary parts (The Epirian Contractor Suppression Team for instance needs an Epirian Contractor Sprue, 2-3 expansion sprues and 1-2 Scarecrow sprues!)

Exciting times for sure, and we thank you for being a part of it :)