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

Every month, we'll be posting a roundup of some of the awesome content posted to the Comm Guild Blog. Below are some of the highlights from September:

We kicked off the month by releasing our latest audiobook, Fracture.



Written by Stephen Gaskell, Fracture continues the story of Kelvin and his family from our first audiobook, Transit.

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Our regular 'Spotlight' articles are intended to show some of the models from our range, and include notes on the design process, colour scheme options and building or conversion guides.

The September Spotlights included a look at the Angel Minnow, and some features on building and assembling Karist Praetorians and Epirian Suppressions teams built from the new Faction Expansion Sprue.



We also shared some alternate colour schemes for Epirian Contractors in white and blue, light blue and a more muted olive and grey, and some blue Karist Tempests and a Karist Trooper in yellow.

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Over time, we've been releasing small articles focusing on different aspects of the Maelstrom's Edge universe. This month, these articles have included features on cybel energy, automated crop ships, Tunnelhuggers, mining ships, refinery ships, common foodstuffs, Karist Arks, Epirian Prospectors, and sneak peeks at the upcoming Epirian Master Handler and the next faction for Maelstrom's Edge: The Broken!

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We also shared a walkthrough of the construction of one of our fantastic studio buildingsusing the Maelstrom's Edge Terrain Sprue, by 3t Studios.

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And all of that is just scraping the surface of the material on the blog. You can find more pics of models and terrain, including some great stuff made by fans and posted on the Comm Guild Facebook Group page, with plenty more to come!

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If you like what you see here, or have questions about the game or the Maelstrom's Edge universe, head on over to the Comm Guild Facebook Group page and and join in the discussion.

Today we share some nice buildings made by Alex and his son over at Lead Balloony

These nice, simple buildings make great use of the computer terminals and small doors, along with some additional decorative elements on the other faces of the buildings. All affixed to some olive pots of all things!

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!

Today's artwork is one which we have not featured too heavily in our literature to date. We are very keen to show as much daily life as we do warfare, and this image is one of the central pieces around that theme.

Click the image above to view it as a larger size.

This city is a typical Epirian city like Pike's Basin on Zycanthus. When the Epirian Foundation starts to terraform a world, it needs a presence on that world. Settlers usually arrive before the atmosphere is fully supportive of life, and so in the early decades of terraforming, settlers live in giant habdomes the size of a small city. As the atmosphere settles, these domes are removed or at least no longer maintained. Being the point of influence for much of the planet, cities grow in and around the original settlements. Often, as shown in the image above, huge buildings spring up through the remains of the original terraforming habdome - something which is left as a reminder of mankind's dominance over the planet.

A handler and two scarecrows watch over the city, silhouetted in the foreground as life goes on, the Maelstrom a distant but ever present concern for its inhabitants.