The Comm Guild Maelstrom's Edge

- by Iain Wilson

In my continuing quest to find all of the fun and cool ways to customise the range of Maelstrom's Edge plastic models, this week I'm having a look at enhancing the humble Epirian Contractor, through the addition of a gas mask or rebreather to help him to stay upright and functional in some of those less human-friendly environments that they might come across on frontier worlds.

What You Need:



Aside from your contractors, you'll need a little green stuff, some sculpting tools (something flat, and something rounded - I like silicon clay shapers (also sometimes sold as 'color shapers' for painting), as they don't stick to the putty the way metal tools do), a little 1mm plastic rod and you may also find a hobby knife and some superglue useful.

You're best off working with the heads before they have been glued on the model, as you have a little more room to maneouvre that way. I find just working with the head on the sprue works well for this.

Note: For those new to putty work, 'green stuff' is the common name for a product called 'Kneadatite', which is a two-part epoxy putty. You have a blue component and a yellow component that you mix together until they go green, at which point they are pliable for sculpting for an hour or two, after which they set to a slightly-rubbery-plastic consistency.

What You Do:

Roll a small ball of green stuff, and press it lightly onto the Contractor's lower face.



Tip: If you're trying to make a number of identical masks, roll out a long, thin sausage of green stuff, and cut off segments for each mask. This makes it much easier to get the same amount of putty for each mask.

Using a flat sculpting tool, press the front of the ball down flat, angling down towards the chin.



Using a rounded or conical tool, roll the sides of the ball down to meet up with the Contractor's earpieces on either side.



If necessary, use a sharp knife to cut the mask off just a fraction below the chin. If it juts down too far, you'll have problems getting the head to sit right without cutting off the front of the collar.



Then, cut yourself two 1-2mm lengths of plastic rod.



Press these into the 'cheeks' of the mask so that they protrude out diagonally downwards. It can help to add a small touch of superglue to the end of the rod that goes into the putty, to help it stick in place. Otherwise, they can work loose once the putty has set.



Leave for a couple of hours to let the putty set, and you're ready to glue the head in place and paint.

You can easily vary the design by modifying where you place the rebreather canister...



...using some guitar string instead if plastic rod, and running it down to a canister on the belt or armour harness...



...or leaving the canister off entirely and having an inset rebreather grill. This style also works well for converting a Karist Angel Keeper.





Working away at your own Contractor Squad? We'd love to see your work! Wander on over to the Comm Guild Facebook page to share your creations!

Sgt Oddball's Epirians make an appearance once again, this time around a small structure he has built. The striking use of bright colour really helps the Epirians to stand out against the cool greys and metallics of the building.

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

The flexibility of having a plastic model range is really shown with the ease of head-swaps that can be done. This excellent example by Panic is part of his Doom force, which is a valid Epirian army, themed around the classic first person shooter videogame 'Doom'. The right colourscheme and a simple head swap really changes the feel of the model. We'll be sharing a lot more of Panic's amazing work in the future!

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've previously covered TP^DC Deputy Manager's excellent mature Angel, and this minnow complements it very well, with a similar basing scheme and colourscheme. The monochromatic base really helps draw the eye to the purple and pink in the minnow.

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

Dakka user and friend of Maelstrom's Edge, Panic, has been an amazing early adopter of the terrain kits. He came up with the great idea of taking an electrical box from a hardware store, slicing some holes into it, and adding Maelstrom's Edge terrain components. The above image shows the finished piece all nicely painted up.

Any basic box that has texture on it already serves as an excellent base for terrain sprue components. One word of warning with electrical boxes though - they are a total pain to cut, so patience is definitely needed!

What is it about Ochre that looks so good on models? This Epirian Hunter by Zambro at Dakka has a great finish and a nice use of contrasting colours that really make the model pop.

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

- 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

The Maelstrom's Edge box set comes with two cardboard objectives for the Karist and Epirian forces. The above shows a lovely physical model based on the Epirian Objective by Sgt Oddball over at Dakka.

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 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!

- 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 extra components to add to the original plastic kits. This seemed like a great chance to expore the versatility of these kits, by looking at different ways to build the new units.


We've already had a look at the Epirian Suppression Team, so this time around I'm having a play with the Karist Praetorians. These veteran warriors are immediately recognisable with their massive Cybel Glaives, or the smaller but deadly Cybel Blade.



The sprue comes with an open hand for holding the Cybel Glaive in a single-handed grip. For the other arm, you can use the arm with clenched fist from the Karist trooper sprue, or the pointing arm from the Expansion sprue, as in the studio images above and below.



With a little cutting and gluing, though, you can use the rifle support hand from the Epirian Contractor sprue on one of the Karist left arms to create a two-handed grip like this:



The left hand will look slightly different to the right, as the Karists have a flat plate on the backs of their gloves which the Epirian hand will lack, but painted up like the other glove it won't be particularly noticable.

Both the Cybel Glaive and the Cyble Blade can be glued to the models' backs, to leave hands free for ranged weapons.



For Cybel Blade-equipped models, you can use the clenched fists which can be found on the Karist Trooper sprue or the Expansion Sprue to hold the sword, by cutting the hand grip off the sword and gluing to the top of the fist, and gluing the bottom of the hand grip to the bottom of the fist. You need to trim off a little of the grip to correspond to the part that would be in the model's hand, otherwise you wind up with a very long handle. You may find it sits better if you sand or file down the top of the fist a little to make sure you have a flat surface to glue the sword onto.



You can achieve some slightly more dynamic posing and make your Praetorians stand out a little more from regular Troopers by using Shadow Walker legs, as below:



It's possible to equip a Praetorian with both a rifle (including a Ripper Grenade Launcher or Radwave Emitter) and a Cybel Blade. If you would like to avoid having to sling one of the weapons on the model's back, you can always combine them both into a single pole-arm:



This was made by cutting away part of the fore-grip on the grenade launcher, trimming the handle off a Cybel Blade and gluing it in place. I then sliced off the back of the grenade launcher directly behind the drum magazine, and attached the shaft of a Cybel Glaive.

For an alternate take on the iconic Cybel Glaive, I tried going the other way and removing the shaft. The blades were attached to the model's forearms, and the power unit glued onto the model's back:



There are plenty of other possibilities for personalising your units from this sprue, or for creating new unit options for your own home-brew rules, like this model armed with a Cybel Halberd, made by flipping the Glaive's blade upside down, and Energy Shield taken from a Kaddar Nova's backpack:



...or this Angel Keeper, built from Kaddar Nova legs, a Shadow Walker torso, Karist Trooper arms and the shaft of a Cybel Glaive, with a mask made by trimming down a Kaddar Nova's crown.



(We'll be looking at Angel Keepers in a little more depth, and sharing a tutorial for building your own, in an upcoming article very soon...)

And finally, if overkill is your thing, here's a Kaddar Nova who clearly favours getting in close and personal with his enemies:






Why not have a try and see what you can come up with yourself? You can pick up the Faction Expansion Sprue in a handy 3-pack in the Maelstrom's Edge Online Store here.

You'll also need the Karist Trooper Sprue (here) for the standard Praetorian builds, or the Shadow Walker (here) or Kaddar Nova (here) sprues for the more adventurous conversions.

Feel free to share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/MaelstromsEdge) - We would love to see what you do with your Praetorian units!

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!

- 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!