The Comm Guild Maelstrom's Edge

- by Iain Wilson

Last week saw the release of the awesome new plastic Secdef to bolster the Epirian battleline with some elite military muscle. If you missed it, you can see the release article here: https://www.facebook.com/maelstromsedge/posts/2244261785589396, and you can also find an assembly guide here: http://www.thecommguild.com/roller/thecommguild/entry/assembly-guide-epirian-secdef.

This week, I'd like to go through some quick and easy modeling ideas to tweak your models. Novice modelers, fear not - nothing here requires extensive conversion experience or special tools!

To (ahem) kick things off, you may have noticed in the assembly guide that the sprue comes with 3 sets of legs - one in a walking pose, and two slightly different standing poses.



The left and right legs from each pair have matching locator pins to help them go together neatly, and these are different sizes for each pair to help you keep them sorted during assembly. You can easily mix-and-match the pairs to create some variation in the posing, though - the smaller pins will fit into the larger locator slots, and for pairings where the locator pins don't fit in you can just cut them off with a sharp hobby knife and glue the hips together without them.



One of the ongoing design goals for the Maelstrom's Edge range has been for the various kits to be compatible wherever possible to enable parts swaps. This is particularly useful for increasing the pool of available heads for any unit, and the open-hand design that has been adopted for weapon arms likewise adds extra options for switching gear around. On the below models, some slightly more hi-tech than usual Contractors have been made by using Contractor heads and weapons on the Secdef bodies.



You can also use heads from the Broken Infantry sprue to add unhelmeted human heads or aliens to your Secdef's ranks.



For an enclosed helmet option, you can use a spare head from the Epirian Bot Handler sprue.



The left arm on the above model has also been modified, removing the pointing hand at the wrist and replacing it with one of the open-palm left hands that normally hold the Secdef heavy guns. The heavy weapon arms are also useful for putting on Sergeants to show tactical hand signals.



Secdef troopers are equipped with a G20 pistol along with their assault rifles, although this isn't included on the sprue. As with other pistol and grenade options that come as standard on various units, there's no specific need, rules-wise, to show these. If you do want to show the pistol, though, the G20 is a variant of the standard Epirian Guardian pistol, so you can use the pistols included on the Contractor sprue to represent them, as has been done on the 'Lieutenant' model below.



(Lieutenants aren't an official unit option currently, although a HQ unit for the Secdef is in the pipeline. I'll be working up an unofficial rules card for this guy to go in the Online Force Builder for those who might want to try out an all-Secdef force.)

Finally for this week - While the designs are slightly different, the strength-boosting exoskeleton makes Secdef legs similar enough to the legs of the Master Bot Handler that you can make a walking Master Handler by simply swapping in the Secdef legs for the normal Master Handler legs, as below. I couldn't resist also taking the opportunity to replace this Master Handler's usual weapons with a modified pair of CG100 Chainguns taken from the Secdef sprue.





What have you done with your Secdef troopers? We would love to see your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

To pick up the Secdef sprue, or any of the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range, visit the webstore here.

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.