Tabletop Game / Turnip 28

A post-apocalyptic wargame about deranged Napoleonic soldiers and foul root vegetables.

Gather your troops. Fix bayonets. Devote yourself to the roots.

Turnip28 is a miniatures-based indie tabletop wargame by Max FitzGerald.

A thousand years after Napoléon Bonaparte's defeat at Austerlitz, the war named for him has dragged on endlessly. Technology has stagnated, culture ravaged, and the geography of Europe is now a terrible mud pit barely fit for human habitation, infested with a tuber that twists bodies and minds but is the only reliable food source. Battles are fought not for command of nations, but for devotion to long-mythologised vegetables, and largely consist of deranged, starving peasants serving incompetent, self-appointed aristocrats, kicking each other to death in waist-deep mud to nobody's gain.

A lot of emphasis is put on building your own unique force from a mixture of historical wargaming miniatures, 3D-printed components (some files are provided), spare Warhammer parts, modelling putty, random household junk, bits of wire and gravel - basically, whatever works for you.

Von Sneg, what tropes are present in Turnip28?

• Abnormal Ammo: In a pinch, you can stuff one of your officers in the Grand Bombard to get another shot.
• Affectionate Parody: Some of the setting elements resemble a version of Warhammer 40,000 with all the mythologising that's crept in since the more satirical early editions thrown back out. It's got a Forever War where armies drag out long-forgotten technology...but the war is accomplishing less than nothing, the Lost Technology is ordinary muskets, and everyone concerned is both miserable and insane.
• After the End: There's no specific apocalypse moment, but Europe is basically just mud.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The Giant Enemy Crab units for the Feast of Charybdis cannot be declared the winner of a combat, so if they don't lose, you have to fight another round until they do lose, or they run out of enemies to eat, whichever comes first.
• Autocannibalism: The text for the Scenario Blunder in "A Long March" cheerfully notes that models can and will eat themselves.
• Bait-and-Switch: The Von Sneg segment for the Fungivorous Herd has Von Sneg and Weezel trying to brand a piglet and producing a smell like cooking bacon...which turns out to be coming from Weezel, who's gotten pinned to a wall by the brand.
• Black Comedy: The beating heart of the game and the main source of its appeal. Units have names like Fodder and Bastards, serving officers like Toffs and Toadies, units can die in all kinds of hilarious ways and the world is so perfectly horrible it wraps around to be funny.
• Black Comedy Cannibalism: The scenario "A Long March", representing two near-starving armies running into each other, has a Scenario Blunder where your soldiers start eating each other and/or themselves. If you find cannibalism particularly funny, the Brotherhood of Greed and its officers, who offer up chunks of their own mutated bodies to buff their soldiers, may be for you.
• Body Horror: Everywhere. Von Sneg, the expert commander who provides FAQ sections for all the cults, has been warped into a pile of writhing toes. The Brotherhood of Greed's horribly mutated officers feed chunks of themselves to their soldiers for buffs.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Most artillery weapons are able to bypass your Vulnerability roll and just wound. The Grand Bombard, in particular, deals six unsaveable wounds to the target unit when it hits, which is enough to turn an entire unit of Brutes into a noticeably redder patch of mud.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Toadies in a Tod's Folly army are actually called Minders. As long as you have them, you can shut down Misguided Confidence and let combat results play out normally by having him stuffed in a sack.
• Combat by Champion: Under certain circumstances, you can declare a "Toff Off", where both armies' Toffs - generals - will withdraw from the general melee to hit each other with sabres until one or both of them die. Since knowing which end of your gun the bullet comes out of makes you a peerless warrior by Turnip28 standards, these can go on for a while.
• Crapsaccharine World: A rare, inverted example. Yes, Europe has become a muddy hellscape populated by deranged vegetable cults, but the populace is pretty content about it. Mainly because, no matter what happens, it can't possibly get worse.
• Crapsack World: Europe in this game offers such pleasant holiday experiences as starving, wading through knee-deep mud, getting your head kicked in, being shot at for worshipping the wrong root vegetable, and being eaten.
• Crutch Character: Taking "Strangling Harry's Wretched Recruits" as your Cult allows you a lot of panic control by letting you remove panic tokens for doing things you're supposed to do anyway, like taking objectives or attacking units while they have Powder Smoke tokens and can't fire back. However, apart from that, more durability and a small unit of regenerating Rootlings, Harry doesn't provide much in the way of other benefits like the healing of the Leech Lovers, the durability and occasionally mobility of the Knights of Shellwood, or the Grand Bombard's ability to delete all but the largest units in one hit.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Strangling Harry opens the section for his cult by calling them five insults in a row, starting with "you disgusting maggots".
• Elite Mooks: The Slug's Lament have Grogs, iron-hard, gun-toting veterans. The price for this isn't low numbers - indeed, they actually bring more units than most people - but that your commander and his personal unit, The Old Guard, won't show up until halfway through the game, tired and frustrated, leaving you out-commanded and vulnerable to scenario blunders that might well have your soldiers start eating each other.
• Fatal Fireworks: St Alamei's Rocket Batteries may not do much damage, but being on the receiving end of their barrages is stressful for everyone concerned.
• Generation Xerox: The various Sons of Tod are, to the frustration of everyone who encounters them, exactly like Tod himself, to the point where a Tod's Folly vs Tod's Folly game has you roll off to determine who's the original Tod.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The main draw of the Feast of Charybdis cult is their devastating crab monsters.
• Giftedly Bad: Tod, the laughably incompetent toad man, whose irrepressible if misguided confidence in his nonexistent skill as a leader reverses winners and losers in battles. If you have a fight you think will actually go your way, Tod's minders have the option to stuff him in a sack until he calms down.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The Brotherhood of Greed see themselves as gourmands. There's not much meat around that's not people.
• Lost Technology: Ordinary muskets are considered impressive heirloom weapons.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Hoo boy. Every Cult has something weird going on. Some of them are very weird, though.
  • Tod's Folly reverses wins and losses in combat, leading to battle-hardened warriors fleeing crappy Fodder they had been in the middle of butchering like hogs.
  • The Fungivorous Herd has a furious pack of violent farm animals that gets larger every time they take dangerous terrain tests - allowing them to fall back from combat into a swamp and actually get stronger.
  • The Red Ribbon Society have a Real-Time Strategy element, with worker units toiling in terrain areas to generate resources (i.e. grow vegetables) to spend on buffing your units - as long as you can keep the enemy out of that terrain, anyway, otherwise they'll trample the garden.
  • The Temple of Swellings does most of its damage using a giant, constantly expanding terrain feature.
  • The Aunts Aloft can control retreat directions using their hot air balloon.
• Mucking in the Mud: It's noted that all over Europe, mud ranges from knee-to-waist deep.
• Noodle Implements: All we know about the event that turned Von Sneg into a nightmarish toe pile is that it involved a paternal potato and an untreated verruca.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Most war engines need a 6 to hit but can do a lot of damage. What makes the Grand Bombard so deadly, apart from its guaranteed 6 unsaveable wounds on a hit, is that by taking objectives, you can make it more accurate - with two objectives it goes from a 1 in 6 chance to hit to 50/50, and no player wants to be staring down a coin toss to decide whether their heavy cavalry will still be there in ten seconds.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilised: The Uprising of the Louse has a giant, intimidating execution tool, such as a guillotine or wicker man, that makes enemy units more likely to blunder, and encourages units of Rabble to form up to defend it.
• Stone Wall: The Knights of Shellwood make your entire army move pitifully slowly, but have a 3+ save, a lot of attacks and four wounds, making them a tough challenge. Also, each unit of snail cavalry you bring lets you spend one turn per game with massively increased speed.
• Super Title 64 Advance: The "28" in "Turnip 28" refers to the 28mm scale of the miniatures used.
• We Have Reserves: A common strategy. Not for nothing is the horde unit called "Fodder". Cults like the Uprising of the Louse can constantly generate new units, which is likely to strain your command resources but sure does let you gum up the board.