Turnip28 Troops and Battles !

Hey everyone ! So a month ago, my good buddy Adrien offered me a gaming opportunity : "I have a free week end in a month, if you fancy it, we can play a lot of Turnip28 !". My immediate response was that I would NEVER EVER have a painted army in such a short notice since my models were not even finished converting for the most part. Then he said I could borrow some of his and that's where I knew it was horribly wrong, not that playing with his wonderful models is, but not doing them the honour of facing something new was not acceptable !

So I took over where I left things and damn I had started quite a lot, this post is going to be a bit messy as my process was but you'll get the full experience !

To start off tough, I wanted to talk about the fluff beind this army/

Edouard Dufion was the son of a moderately rich family who wanted to gain fame and riches through his military prowess. His relative wealth and respectable lignage were his only assets though. The man was as ignorant as he was stubborn and short sighted. After losing one too many battles, his general the Duke Henri Bonafarte went into such a rage he tld Dufion to go to Hell. Thick as barrel, Dufion did just that. With all his troops, not knowing where to go, they just marched forward until they reached the nightmare regions of hell where the little sanity they had vanished, their faces melting leaving just skulls, twisting their bodies and shattering their already weakened minds.
When Dufion came back to report, he was one the wiser but his troop had become a formidable although fragile force who were able to overcome the absolute incompetence of their officer, earning him a great place back amongst the table of influents personalities.

The first idea I had for this game, even before playing demo games back in  October was to have those sort of fantomatic commissars, I first thought I could use them for Silver Baionet then decide to recycle them for Turnip after testing and loving the game. It didn't take much to make them work with the help of my brother Michael who printed plenty of parts for me. That's how the first unite of brutes was born.

 

With one month ahead and so much to do, painting had tobe kept to the most basic, no fancy stuff, careful blending or anything, just the  most straight forward techniques which I guess is more than OK on this one shot project and the style of the game !

Meanwhile, I had no real idea for mounted troops and could barely make the difference between Whelps and Bastards then so I build enough riders to accomodate for all  options, also realising I had just 4 running pairs of legs which would be perfect to make my Chaffs !

The unit of chaff was painted amongst the first with the fodder, I've come to LOVE those guys who feel pretty weak and low numbered on paper but happen to be extremely useful in game thanks to their skirmishing abilities.

Now the troops were also an idea I had for a while, having troopers with skeletal faces which I first meant to paint like wraiths but I thought it would be too supernatural and not "down in the mud" enough for the project.

With the basic builds done, I knew where I was headed a little better so I finished converting everythig, neating things up and adding some details. I would have added considerably more if it wasn't for time constraints but it would have probably meant stalling somewhere along the projects too since I don't really like putty work. In a way, that huge time constraint enabled me to just go with the flow and get tings done even if not to the standard I would have aimed for in normal times.

That said, I did let myself play a bit with the Fodder unit by giving them a freehanded banner, simple and silly but that does the job I reckon !

The inspiration is from Bartolomeo Colleoni's arms because his name sounded like testicles, so I just added a naked butt to all the flags because that's how childish I still am !

Now the rest of the troops were getting close to done !

Painting on those riders was starightforward, following the steps I had establisehd with the others :

Now I had a spare horse and wanted to mae a mounted Snob to lead the riders so I converted the fat general into fitting on a regular horse which is great comedy I reckon. He's Edouard Dufion in terms of lore but practically, he can eitherbe a Snob or a Toff depending on how I want the game to look really.

Painting went along the rest but I could add a little more colours with the mutated arms and fly cloud behind :

And while we're sharing work in progress images, here's a picture of the Snobs before painting since someone asked !

Now out of nowhere, I decided I wanted a stump gun, sinceit could be pretty much any kind of artillery, I opted for a rack of missiles on a weird cart so I cut about 3 missile racks and a canon frame to turn them into a monstrosity adorned with a bone plate and horse figurehead.

As you might have guessed, painting this one after building was a huge pain in the butt but like for the rest, I pretty much decided that if the brush couldn't reach, the eyes wouldn't either and it looks just fine on the tabletop !

Now the game requires to keep track of panic depending on what your units faced, it can be tracked with tokens but I'm a messy players and I often forget tokens where the units was so since panic is limited to 6, I've decided to keep track of it with dice and holders to make sure they're not moved or mistaken for gaming dice.
To make those, I simply took Renedra bases, stuck some cheap air drying clay and some skulls and punched some dice into them with some plastic wrap to avoid ruining my dice.

All I had to do was to give them a little sand and stick the skulls that were a little loose :

Painting was pretty much just painting a regular base with a few skulls so it really only took 2 sittings because of drying times and maybe just an hour of actual work total :

Now the real reward was at the end ! I had actually painted the army and I would get to spend a bit of time with a dear friend and a very funny. If you don't know what it is about, think Tex Avery, Mordheim's Carnival of chaos, armpit fights and guys slipping into fresh turds with a slide whistle. It's extremely dynamic and 2 of our games ended on the second turn, one on the third and only one got to the end of 4th. The rules save a lot of time by removing True lines of sights, making fleeing distances even longer as panic builds up so units can cross the field rapidly, move out of limits and die, take dangerous terrain tests and act a lot in a turn wether it's your own or your opponent's.

All of this doesn't take one bit of tactics and timing of your actions is of the essence. Sometimes a very simple actions can have tremendous consequences in the long runs, moving your officers to convey orders, making them challenge one another, the issue of the battle is often reliant on a small mistake.
The cult rules are also very fun and offer a totally different experience from one another. I mostly played the Procession of Woe and its Rootshrine this time (and I'm definitely aking a model for it)

A weird monster from Kingdom Death made a cameo on one of our scenarios, causing chaos and honestly quite some fear on the table

We even got to play a siege game. Sieg games can easily become time clogs and this one was extremely brutal and dynamic, showing just how punchy the rules are.

My troops just blitzed through the only breach in the walls 

A well timed Toff off (two generals declaring a duel) got us exhilarated for 4 turns where none would take the upper hand until my rootshrine (embodied by a wickerman here) took the win, turning the hand of the game to my relief !

I hope this all gave you a hint of how fun this project was, if a little exhausting in the end, it really paid off ten folds with 4 games played over a wonderful day, gave me a huge mojo boost for completing an ambitious projects and I know have everything to play some more so it's an unexpected but very rewarding tangent I took.
I hope you all have a wonderful hobby time !