Maelstrom Rules

Building Your Own Maelstrom Deck

Under the old Maelstrom rules, your deck was pretty much the deck. You had 36
cards, or 36 objectives numbered 11-66 if you were a crazy person rolling on
the table in the rulebook, and you generated them randomly in different ways
depending on the mission being played – from the simple “draw 3” of Cleanse &
Capture right through to the craziness of Tactical Cascade. The Refined
Strategy rule from the Chapter Approved 2018 missions added a much-needed
deck-building element, allowing you to drop up to 6 cards from the deck before
a game, but that was about it.

The Schemes of War rules in the June 2019 White Dwarf are something else
altogether. Rather than just using or modifying the standard Maelstrom deck,
you construct a custom deck of objectives by picking 18 cards from those
available to your army – i.e. the 36 base ones, plus the 6 faction ones (12 if
you’re Black Legion). You can’t include any cards with duplicate names, which
rules out stacking the deck with the same objective and also, presumably,
taking multiples of the “Secure Objective X” objectives. Notably you do
this before deployment and objective placement – strictly you do it when
choosing your army, although how this will work in practice in a tournament
setting is a matter for individual TOs.

Unlike traditional Maelstrom missions, where all of the objectives a player held
were active, the Schemes of War rules give each player a hand of 5 objectives
that make up their Objective Hand. Your hand is kept hidden from other players.
At the start of your turn, you choose three of the objectives in your hand to be
your “in-play” objectives. Two of these have to be placed face up, i.e. visible to
both players, but one can be face-down (and therefore hidden). You can only
score the objectives that are in-play. Once you place your in-play objectives,
you draw cards until you have a hand of five again.

Drawing your Initial Hand

Players start the game by shuffling their objective decks and drawing 5 cards for
their objective hands, and straight away there’s something interesting here – if
you don’t like your hand, you can essentially take a “mulligan” — you can put
them at the bottom of the deck and draw 4 replacements. Immediately there’s a
decision to make, and far greater control of the cards available to you: Before

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any dice have been rolled, you can cycle through 9 of the objectives in your
deck to get something you’re comfortable with. This should banish, or at least
significantly reduce, the phenomenon of watching your opponent draw a flush of
“Defend This Objective Here In My Deployment Zone, Fucko” cards while you
stare helplessly at a hand of unscoreable garbage.

Scoring
In terms of scoring, you check at the end of every player turn, and must score
objectives if you can (including your hidden one) and then discard them, i.e.
place them face-up in a separate discard pile which effectively takes them out of
the game.

Discarding Objectives
There’s some other rules here around discarding objectives, and there’s a
specific carve-out for how to deal with unachievable objectives which functions
more or less how people have house-ruled it in the past.

Maelstrom of War Missions

As a general rule for friendly games, our first suggestion is to forget about
trying to jam this square peg into the round hole of the missions that are out
there, and use it more or less as written to form a complete mission by itself.
Effectively, use the set-up rules from Cleanse & Capture (i.e. the “basic”)
Maelstrom mission, and then apply the rest of the Schemes of War rules for the
tactical objectives part. This should still provide for varied, fun games, since
you’ll build your deck differently for different opponents, and of course
Maelstrom lends itself to emergent gameplay.

If you really do want to play with the Maelstrom missions, then here are the six
that you should be able to play more or less as written, albeit ignoring any rules
around generating or discarding objectives. We’ve even given you a table to roll
for them on:

D6 Mission Location Notes

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 Cleanse and
1 Basic Rulebook, page 230
Capture

2 Cloak and Shadows Basic Rulebook, page 234 All in-play objectives are played face-down

Targets of Chapter Approved 2017, Each player discards all of their in-play objec
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Opportunity page 75 of each of their turns

Chapter Approved 2017,

4 Race to Victory
page 77

Chapter Approved 2017,

5 Recon
page 79

Chapter Approved 2018,

6 Decapitation Strike
page 55

We’ve chosen these because they count on having 3 objectives in hand at all
times and can be adapted with minimal work. If there’s another Maelstrom
mission you want to play, then you’ll need to plan ahead for exactly how it’s
going to work. One way to do this might be to adapt the number of cards in the
deck and hand for the number of “in-play” objectives you expect there to be –
for example, if the mission calls for players to have 4 objectives which would
effectively be in-play, then consider making the deck 24 cards instead, with 6
cards in-hand at any one time and 4 in-play.