My Miniature Tabletop Game Journey
Blog 1: Turnip28, Kitbashing and Narrative
Author: a_terrible_lizard
When I was about 13, a tabletop Role Playing Game (RPG) and miniature gaming shop opened in my hometown, in Italy. This little shop had a massive impact on the younger population as it brought to our attention a series of amazing objects we had never seen before. This is the place where I admired for the first time a Dungeons & Dragons player handbook (3rd edition!) and the beautiful Vampire: The Masquerade guides. I remember spending so much time in there, flipping through the pages of a variety of different RPG books that were far beyond what I could afford, filling my eyes and my head with images and stories.
D&D 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook
The town where I grew up was not too dissimilar to Kirkcaldy, maybe just a bit smaller and with more pizzerias. My group of friends and I had really no idea of what an RPG or miniature game was, but we were curious and eager to understand this new fascinating colourful world. For a while, we participated in the free experiences the shop offered to attract new customers: play your first Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) session, paint your first Warhammer miniature, play your first miniature game, etc. After several months I finally managed to save enough money to buy a box of plastic miniatures. I also bought some paints together with my friends and that was really the start of my miniature hobby journey.
Unfortunately, the shop did not survive long and had to close after a year and a half. The group of Warhammer enthusiasts also died with it, as we had suddenly lost our main gathering place. I put my miniatures in a box and forgot them for two decades.
Until two years ago, when my wife and I joined the Kirkcaldy Gaming Society (KGS) as we were looking for an inclusive and welcoming group of people to play some D&D with. That’s when I started seeing miniatures again. And it didn’t take long until we got some models to paint for our D&D sessions.
After a while, however, I started feeling a new (or maybe old) itch: the desire to create larger sets of miniatures bound together by theme or narrative and then be able to use them in conjunction with a ruleset that could infuse them collectively with life.
Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40k were the first systems I looked at. They made me familiar again with the idea of having a more or less ongoing hobby project to then eventually bring your own little creatures to the gaming table (and these games have such great miniatures!). After a while, KGS started introducing people to One Page Rules – OPR (https://www.onepagerules.com/), a system that offers free rules, very simple and easy to learn, and a lot of freedom in creating your own armies and warbands.
I started painting a variety of different miniatures and I also had a lot of fun making paper standees for the game. The flexibility of OPR unveiled a new approach to the miniature hobby before my eyes. And as I was searching for YouTube contents related to it, I encountered my next major discovery: Turnip28.
Turnip28 is a post-apocalyptic root-vegetable based Napoleonic setting and a ruleset developed by Max Fitzgerald (https://www.patreon.com/Turnip28).
The introduction of the Turnip28 Swollen Magglette describes the setting better than I could ever do:
Official artwork for Turnip28
“A thousand years after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz, the world has fallen into decay. Endless war has led to technology stagnating, and beautiful countrysides have been ground to a thick ruin under the boots of a million dead men. Now, nothing grows. A bizarre and horrible root covers the land; strangling the life from the trees, poisoning the water, and filling the sky with an acrid mist.
Humanity barely endures by harvesting this disgusting tuber. It twists their bodies and minds, and infests their thoughts with divine visions of lost vegetables.”
The game checked all the boxes for me:
· Free rules
· Weird and unique setting
· Welcoming community
· Creativity heavily encouraged
The art for the rulebook and the photos of the miniatures put together by Turnip28 players immediately captured my imagination: a mix of grimdark, miserable and funny, with an aftertaste of medieval marginalia. The muddy land of Cist, where regiments of incompetent soldiers may fight over an argument on what spud tastes the best, felt cozy and full of creative possibilities. In particular, the setting provides an arbitrary constraint (the only plant life that exists is root vegetables) which works very well for me and the way I enjoy making stories for my miniatures.
To build your regiment, Turnip28 encourages sculpting and kitbashing. Kitbashing or model bashing is the practice of taking parts of models from different kits and putting them together to create something entirely new.
The “traditional” Turnip28 starter set is a box of Perry Miniatures AO 60 Agincourt Foot Knights 1415-29 and Perry Miniatures FN 250 French Napoleonic Infantry Battalion 1807-14, and this is what I bought initially. I also managed to get a couple of Frostgrave Soldier II sprues and a few 3d printed bits to add some variety.
I chose a cult (a Turnip28 faction) for my regiment, the Fungivorous Herd, and built a little story to give a direction to my kitbashes. The 27th Amanita Gastronomers, led by Lady Cantharella, travel around Cist to spread the good word: fungi and root vegetables are destined to be together and a diet without fungi is sadly inconvenient. This regiment welcomes in its ranks anybody who understands and accepts this undeniable truth. Those who deny it however, will be forced to embrace the sacred union of fungus and root and if they are destroyed in the process…well, it is their fault.
What I like to do when it comes to kitbashing, is to work on each individual model trying to give them something peculiar that tells a little story. So, for example, here we have Rupert (image below). He is not great at shooting, but he always brings lukewarm potato tea on the battlefield (it is really starchy water with a bit of rust mixed in for extra flavour).
This creative process, where I look at the rules and setting, the miniature parts I have, and then I build a story, opens up a space where I can unwind at the end of my day and travel to strange places with my thoughts.
Turnip28 is one of the settings/systems that provide me with a framework where I feel I can explore the interaction between the crafty part of the miniature hobby and narrative in a very fun way. It is not the only game that has this function for me, but it is certainly one of the more unique ones and it is a good introduction to kitbashing and more niche painting techniques.
In the next episode of My Miniature Tabletop Game Journey I will talk about the synergy between miniature painting and storytelling.