Broken Attack Buggy for Maelstrom's Edge - a Mantic Raptor conversion

I picked up a Mantic crazy box a while back, and in amongst the other assorted bits and pieces was a (discontinued, but currently temporarily resurrected by Mantic) Raptor buggy. I was never a fan of the tricycle look, but other than that it looked like a fun little vehicle, so I decided to convert it into a 4-wheel buggy for my Maelstrom's Edge Broken force. With a little tinkering, I wound up with this:



Here's what I started with:



In the interests of making it a quick and painless conversion, I decided to not have a gunner standing on the back. This saved me from having to convert one from a Broken model (I suppose I could have just used the original Marauder as a Broken xeno, but to be honest that didn't occur to me as a possibility, since I've never liked the look of the Marauder models) and also gave the option of using the back platform to add some sort of transport rule to the buggy - I'm picturing it ferrying small units around the board, as the platform is big enough for three at least human-sized models to stand on, if you disregard their bases.

So, the first step in building the buggy was to remove the trigger extension from the weapon mount. There was also a locator on the top surface that I removed so that I could spin the mount around and have the weapon pointing upwards instead of down across the roof.



The boom for the single front wheel had to go (which was just as well, as it was cast horribly twisted and wouldn't have gone together right anyway), but the actual wheel attachments were useful, so I removed them and glued them onto a pair of GW Space Marine bike wheels.





I glued on the rear wheels, and then glued the new front wheels on where they belonged.



From there, the rest of the buggy could be assembled - rear mudguards, exhaust and weapon mount.



The final detail was to add some axel hubs on the new front wheels with a little plastic tubing.



This left me with a vehicle that looked like this:



Yup, that'll do. A quick coat of paint, and it's ready to go:









If you want to build and use your own Broken attack buggy, there's an unofficial rules card for it in the Force Builder section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

MEdge 40K: Space Marines in Maelstrom's Edge

One of the trials faced by many gamers as they get older and have to start acting like grown-ups more often is the decline in available time for gaming, which tends to leave many of us having to cut back the number of games we play. The problem with that, of course, is what to do with those piles of miniatures left over from the games that have fallen by the wayside?

This is something I wrestled with as Warhammer 40000 started to lose its shine and Maelstrom's Edge came along to fill in the void. The obvious solution, of course, is to find ways to incorporate those other miniatures into your new game! And so, with bold visions of an Empire of Mankind raising battle flags along the implacable line of advance of the galactic Maelstrom, I set about converting Space Marine statlines and special rules into something that would fit in alongside MEdge's Epirians, Karists and as-yet unborn future factions.

You can find the current (draft) version of these efforts at the below links. The first link contains the cards for all of the Marine units created so far. The second contains a reference sheet for all of the Marine weaponry and their Faction-specific objective. Note that these rules are NOT 'official' rules for Maelstrom's Edge, and are not published or endorsed by Spiral Arm Studios (the makers of MEdge). They're a fan creation that you can use, or not, at your own discretion.

Imperial Marine Unit Cards

Imperial Marine Reference Sheet

(If you don't have them yet, you can pick up the Maelstrom's Edge rules from the webstore as a digital download here, or the print copy in the Battle for Zycanthus starter set here.)

These Marine rules are still in progress - I suspect that point costs on some things still need some upwards tweaking, and the roster is currently fairly sparse, including just a selection of the more common units. More will come later.

One of the biggest challenges that arose when I started making up these cards came from the fact that many Warhammer 40K units have a significantly broader range of options than standard MEdge units do. I have sidestepped this somewhat by limiting the options for these initial units to the more obvious ones, with later unit variants to add in other options. I am also intending to add in a 'Veteran Sergeant' card which will be available as an upgrade to other units' sergeants, adding in a wider range of gear for the unit leader - there simply wasn't room on the cards to give these options to standard sergeants.

My hope from putting these out there is that gamers with space marine models sitting around gathering dust, or current 40K players looking for something different, will be tempted to give MEdge a go and in the process kick these rules in the tyres a little to see which bits fall off.

So if you try these out, and have any comments, criticisms or other feedback, please feel free to drop me a line here or on the Maelstrom's Edge Comm Guild Facebook group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/MaelstromsEdge/.