The Comm Guild Maelstrom's Edge

- by Iain Wilson

The Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue is a fantastic resource for enhancing your games. Packed as it is with different bits and pieces for crafting buildings and scifi accessories, it serves as a handy base to combine with foamcore, cardboard, plastic containers, the cat*, foam packaging inserts, plumbing supplies, or anything else you can think of to create distinctive and personalised battlefield terrain.


*Don't glue things to the cat. Seriously.


For now, I'd like to focus on one particular way to use the sprue, by crafting a basic building using a cardboard gift box.





These are fairly readily available all over the place, are generally made of a fairly sturdy cardboard, and are (best of all) cheap. You can also get them with all sorts of pretty patterns on them, but you'll probably want to paint them, so that’s less important, really.


Here’s a quick video showing the build process:





You will need: a giftbox, the terrain sprue, some glue (superglue for gluing the plastic parts on, PVA/wood glue for gluing the box lid on) clippers, a pencil, a sharp knife, and a ruler can be useful for marking out parts.





I want a building with a walled roof, as that gives some nice line of sight-blocking terrain while giving troops somewhere elevated to stand. So the box will be turned upside down, and the lid will eventually be glued on top, also upside down.





First step is to cut the parts you want to use off the sprue and clean up any mould lines.


I'm using the long support pieces vertically on the walls of the building, so they need to be trimmed down to the height of the box. That's simply a case of taking the lid off, holding one of the supports against the box to mark where to cut it, and then cutting them all off at that point.





Put the leftover pieces aside - they'll come in handy for other projects.


Next, measure out where the supports will go on the building. I tend to use them slightly in from the corners of my buildings, rather than as corner bracing - this looks neater, as they don't meet in a flush corner if you butt them up against each other right on the edge.


You can put them wherever you like, so long as it's consistently spaced around the building. Here, I've used a corner brace to mark out the spacing, by placing it up against the corner and marking against the side of it. Repeat top and bottom on both sides of each wall.





Next, work out where you want to put your door. Hold it in place against the building wall and draw around the back of the door frame with a pencil.








Do the same for the windows - I've gone for one on each end of the building.





Then take your knife and carefully cut out the door and window holes. Note that the windows don't actually have to be inset into the walls - the box frame design means that they actually look pretty good just glued on the outside. So you can save yourself some cutting if you're in a hurry. I do prefer to inset them, though, as it looks a little more polished.








Once the holes are cut out, check that the parts fit in securely - trim up if necessary.





Then it's time to glue everything in place. Apply a small amount of glue around the door and window frames and push them into place. You can 'hide' the glue behind the protruding frame on the sides and bottom of the windows, so that you get less overflow onto the cardboard.





Run a line of glue down the back of the supports, and press them into place against your pencil marks on each wall.








Next, grab your box lid, and on the inside mark out where you want the roof hatch to go. Once again I've used the corner brace to mark out an even distance from the sides of the box lid. Then glue the hatch in place.





Now we can glue the roof on. Spread some PVA glue liberally over the top side of the building, press the lid on upside down, and sit something heavy on top to hold it snugly in place while the glue sets.





You could use superglue for this if you don't have any PVA or if you're in a hurry, but the PVA glue gives a better bond if there are irregularities in the cardboard that stop the two pieces from meeting perfectly flush.





While the roof is setting, we can hack the sprue a little to add some extra detail to the back of the building. Cut a corner piece off the narrower side of the sprue, as below. This will become the pipe for a small chimney or air vent.





Clean off the extra tabs and the mould line, and grab the small pipe fitting off the sprue.


A handy feature of this part of the sprue is that it fits perfectly into a 1/4"(7mm) plasticard tube, which in turn fits snugly into the small pipe fitting. So cut yourself two short segments of tubing - one for each end of the 'pipe'. If you don't have any plasticard, you can also use a strip of thin cardboard (cereal packet or the like) wrapped around the sprue instead.





Glue the tubing (or cardboard strips) onto the 'pipe', glue the curved end into the pipe fitting, and check the fit against the back wall of the building. You can trim up the protruding sprue support as necessary to make sure the chimney sits vertically and the pipe fitting is flush against the wall. Then glue in place.





I have also added one of the small vent pieces that was trimmed off the wall supports right at the start, just for a little extra detail, and glued a comm panel onto the front wall beside the door.


So the finished building looks something like this:





This can then be decorated however you like. I would recommend a good spray paint for the basecoat, particularly if the boxes you are using have a glossy finish. The building below was basecoated with black spray, and then given a spray coat of a medium grey, and a final highlight with a light grey spray from above, to leave the darker colour in the recesses and undercuts.





The 'chimney' pipe was painted in copper with a light drybrush of green to dirty it up, and some details like the comm panel screen and the light above the door picked out for a little extra colour. You could also add on building numbers, posters, warning signs, or anything else that you might find on a real building - we'll be covering some different ways to pretty up your battlefield terrain in a later article.




Pick up the terrain sprue from the Maelstrom's Edge online store here and give it a go! You can share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MaelstromsEdge

We have quite a few pieces of terrain in our studio collection now. One of our absolute favourites is the strategic outpost.

The upper floor's windows are transparent plastic, and not visible in the photos is a cool staircase leading to the upper floor.

This building was primarily made out of foamcore, thin plasticard and normal card, and the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue.

This morning on the Maelstrom's Edge: Comm Guild facebook community group, Christopher Wailes‎ posted these fantastic dig site objectives. We wanted to share them widely, immediately as they are really good!

This week's photo is of a nice, light blue colourscheme for the Epirians. A lot brighter and less military drab than most of our other palettes, this scheme uses a classic blue/orange colour combo to good effect. The model has also been assembled with stuff underfoot, changing the default pose of the Epirian Contractor.

We don't have any robots painted up in this colourscheme yet, but would love to see some if anyone out there wants to have a go!

- by Iain Wilson

The new Faction Expansion Sprue saw the addition of new units to the game for both the Karist and Epirian factions, with additional components to add to the original plastic kits. This seemed like a great opportunity to expore the versatility of these kits, by looking at different ways to build the new units.

So to kick things off, we'll be looking at the Epirian Suppression Team. These doughty warriors take the field armed with the standard Epirian Maglock weapons, but also have the option to replace either pistol or rifle with a Shock Baton or Shock Maul.



The studio models shown above were assembled with the Shock weapons slung on the models' backs, which is the easiest and quickest way to assemble them, particularly if you want to arm them with their rifles. This is simply a matter of gluing the Baton or Maul straight to the Contractors' back plates. We would assume that they're held there with a magnetic latch system, or some similar thing.



An easy alternative is to use one of the Contractor rifle arms to hold the Shock weapon. Several of the rifle arms have the trigger finger fairly close to the other fingers, and so they don't look too out of place holding the Shock weapon handle. You can also gently bend the trigger finger in to reduce the gap even further (The Shock Baton does have a chunkier grip than the Maul, so if you're having trouble getting it to fit, you can shave down the sides of the grip a little).



You can slice the arms at the wrist and/or just under the rolled sleeves on the upper arm and reposition to give some more interesting poses. On the Maul-equipped model below, the right arm has been swivelled just under the rolled sleeve to move the hand outwards from the body, and on the other model one of the rifle support arms has been used with the hand rolled at the wrist to give him an 'at-rest' pose with the baton resting on the ground.



You can also use the open Karist hand on the Expansion sprue to replace one of the rifle hands. On the model below, I've used that hand for the Shock Baton, and swapped the pointing hand off the Karist arm on the sprue onto one of the Epirian rifle arms. The end result is a model wearing Karist gloves, but with the Epirian arms they still look quite distinct from the Karist models.



The team members' ranged weapons can be dealt with several different ways. For models equipped with pistols, you can use the pistols and weapon arms from the Contractor sprue, of course. However, if you've used the right arm for the Shock weapon, an easy alternative is to glue the pistol onto the model's belt, or to use the legs from the Bot Handler sprue and hang the pistol off the strapped pouch on the thigh. For either of these, it's a good idea to cut off the revolver drum on the side of the pistol that will attach to the model, to allow it to sit more flush against the leg.



For rifle-equipped models, you can reverse the idea from the studio models, and mag-lock the rifle to the model's back. Or you can use the rifle support arms to balance the rifle against the model's hip, as below.



With the rifle safely stowed on the model's back, you can use the rifle arms to create a two-handed grip on the Shock weapons, as below. Depending on the specific arm pairing you go for, a little wrist-repositioning can be necessary to get these sitting just right.



For a slightly more out-of-the-box alternative, the below model was assembled using the arms from the Bot Handler sprue, instead of Contractor arms. For the Shock Baton, I cut off the Handler's underslung grenade launcher, chopped the heatsink part off the back of the Baton, and glued it in place running along the forearm. This can be positioned pointing forwards for an 'Active' pose, or reversed for a 'Standby' or 'At-Rest' pose.



You can pick up the Faction Expansion Sprue in the Maelstrom's Edge Online Store here.

You'll also need the Epirian Contractor Sprue (here) or for the arm-mounted conversion, the Bot Handler Sprue (here)

As you can see, there are a lot of possibilities with these models, thanks to the ease of assembly and conversion with the plastic models. I've only just scratched the surface with the builds shown here. Feel free to share what you come up with on the Comm Guild Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/MaelstromsEdge) - it's always great to see how others put their own spin on the model range!

Next up, I'll be taking a look at the Cybel Glaive-equipped Karist Praetorians. Stay tuned!

We really love how this Karist Trooper turned out in yellow, with a complementary blue cybel glow. Using the indents on the face plate as a stripe marker was something we'd considered doing to mark out sergeants in the squad, but it never looked half as good as it does here as a natural part of the colour scheme.

Part of our plan for the comm guild is to have some consistent weekly content in place. You might have noticed the beautifully named 'Artwork Overview Tuesday' earlier this week. Today is Terrain Thursday - a day each week when we'll share something related to the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue, from building templates to pictures of things people have made using it.

Opening the terrain posts is this nice, simple structure designed to look like a quick prefab house that is shipped alongside other shipping containers.

A simple rectangular box is accented with a cardboard trim, then plastic corner components from our terrain sprue are put on each corner, a large door in the middle, a window and pipe fitting on one end, and a door, terminal, steps and light fitting on the other.

For 15 minutes effort, a nicely themed piece of terrain is born.

If you are not familiar with the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue, it is a plastic sprue that contains a whole host of plastic components which allow you to easily create terrain for your 28-32mm science fiction battlefields. Visit the Maelstrom's Edge store to learn more!

Wrapping up this week's expansion sprue content, we thought we'd list the sprues you need to make each unit.

Karist Praetorians

Minimum requirements: 1x Karist Trooper Sprue, 1x Faction Expansion Sprue
Maximum requirements: 2x Karist Trooper Sprue, 3x Faction Expansion Sprue (the max 2 cybel glaives are on a single sprue, but for a larger size unit you'll need more loin cloths and, if so desired, 5 cybel blades)

Epirian Contractor Suppression Team

Minimum requirements: 1x Epirian Contractor Sprue, 1x Faction Expansion Sprue
Maximum requirements: 2x Epirian Contractor Sprue, 5x Faction Expansion Sprue (if you want the max 5 shock batons/mauls), 2x Epirian Scarecrow Sprue

Cybel Mine Equipped Shadow Walker

Minimum requirements: 1x Karist Shadow Walker Sprue, 1x Faction Expansion Sprue
Recommended requirements: 1x Karist Shadow Walker Sprue, 2x Faction Expansion Sprue (to also make a mine on a base token to represent mine deployment)

Customised Karist Troopers / Karist Assault Troopers

Recommended: 2x Karist Trooper Sprue, 1x Faction Expansion Sprue (for the variety of extra parts and poses)
Maximum requirements: 2x Karist Trooper Sprue, 3x Faction Expansion Sprue (for the max 5 cybel blades)

Remember, the faction expansion sprue is only discounted for 2 more days, so head over to the Maelstrom's Edge webstore and pick them up now if you have been waiting :)

It is with great pleasure that we can now offer the Faction Expansion Sprue for sale at the Maelstrom's Edge webstore.

The faction expansion sprue is needed to build the following new units:

Epirian Contractor Suppression Teams

Karist Praetorians

and it adds new options for:

Karist Shadow Walkers (cybel mine)

Epirian Contractors (shock battons, as well as helmet and covered arm options)

Karist Troopers (cybel blades, new head)

as well as Karist Trooper Assault Squads (cybel blades and extra weapons).

The faction expansion sprue contains the following components (in no particular order):

1x small knife (faction independent but generally more appropriate for Karists)
1x EMP grenade
1x Choke grenade
1x Cybel Charge
1x Rad Grenade
1x Swarmer Grenade
3x different Epirian helmeted heads (usable on contractors and contractor suppression teams)
1x Karist pistol without attached hand
2x Karist cybel blades
1x Epirian shock baton
3x Karist new hand poses (grip, hold, clench)
1x Epirian shock mace
2x Karist pulse carbines without attached hands
2x Karist grenade launchers without attached hands
2x Karist radwave emitters without attached hands
5x Epirian clothed left arms
5x Epirian clothed right arms
1x Cybel mine
1x Karist shouting bald head
1x Karist trooper pointing arm
3x Karist praetorian loincloths (keyed to leg poses on the Karist Trooper sprue)
2x Karist cybel glaives

As part of our launch promotion, the sprue is being sold at a discounted rate until the 22nd Aug. Right now it is just £2.33 / $3.33 per sprue for a limited time, and sold in packs of 3. On the 22nd the price will go up to the normal price, increasing by £1/$1 per sprue.

We'll be revealing more of the new unit options over the next few days. For now, here's an early look at the new unit cards for the Praetorians, Assault Squads and Contractor Suppression Teams:

Thanks for reading! For now and the immediate future, the expansion sprues are only available through the Maelstrom's Edge webstore, so feel free to head over and take a look.