Let's go on an Eggventure

Let's go on an Eggventure into Turnip28

Intro

It is another Saturday morning and I find myself sitting down at what is becoming "my" table, with a black coffee and my laptop (charged and with power adapter this week (fucking shocked myself unplugging it just now.....) to make another entry into this journal/blog/assembly of ramblings.

I believe this will most likely be a three part post. Today I am going to focus on conception and realisation of my latest project. Next I am planning to write up the lore revolving around the project, and then if I can summon the capacity I would like to have a go at writing some homebrew rules for the project.

My wife and I are actually going to see some live music (first time in more than a few months) at the end of July. The band we're going to see perform is Future Islands and so right now I am listening to their latest album "people who aren't there any more".

Turnip28

Turnip28 has been in my peripheral since around the begining of 2024. I had seen models posted on instagram, had a perusal of the rules and listened to the excellent interview with Max FitzGerald on the 32 podcast. If you're not sure what Turnip28 is I would recommend either reading the linked interview with Max conducted by "Lupe" of Goonhammer GoonHammer Max Interview. Or listening to the previously mentioned interview below. Equally checking out the 28 discord is generally good advice for anyone exploring this alternative space to modelling and tabletop (Discord link 28).

Catalyst

So I was aware of this game and community but didn't really do anything with it. I was working on other projects and other systems and communities had my focus during that period of time. Then two things happened during the last week of May. 

Firstly I had the week off work to spend some time with my daughter during half term. On one of these days we went into our local town to visit Hobby Hive a local gaming store and Close Encounters a local comic book store. Hobby Hive has an excellent bits bins and I thought it would be interesting to see what stuff my daughter would pick so we each grabbed a bag and began filling them with stuff.

When we got home we assessed what each of us had picked (making a little game out of by getting her younger sister to vote for her favorites). Through this process I realised she had picked a ton of Ogor Mawtribe heads and for some reason these stood out to me. 

Now I'm not really sure what inspired me during the next step but somehow I went from having Ogor Mawtribe heads in my hand to ordering little foam eggs. I don't know whether I had been subconsciously absorbing something my kids where watching, had seen some imagery or whatever but I had developed a very clear idea that I wanted to make some fucking humpty dumpty looking models.

As the idea continued to percolate I started to think about what setting I wanted these eggs to live in and this brings us to the next event in this journey. On the 26th of May the 4th TurnipCon was held, throughout the next week people who had participated in the con and the con's IG account turnipconofficial where posting photos of the event. The models depicted in the posts stood out to me for their originality, creativity and shear wackiness. I started feel like this could be a great home for the idea which was starting to take shape in my head. The real clincher was when I watched googlyeyedskull's youtube review of the event Turnipcon killed warhammer. The people and environment, the rules and gameplay, and the culture that he described really sounded like something that I would quite like to be part of.

So it was decided this slightly weird idea I had would be applied to the world of Turnip28.

Regiment Design

In Turnip28 there is an additional design that you can add to your regiments called cults. These cults add lore and mechanics to your regiments to give them more flavor. I had a read through these and couldn't really see where my very distinct idea would fit in (Recently I have thought that I could modify alice and mole quite nicely) and so I decided to build my regiment to play as vanilla. This gives me the opportunity as described above to create my own lore and hopefully my own mechanics.

After looking at the possible options I settled on the following Regiment:

• Toff
• Fodder
• Stumpgun
• Toady
• Bastards
• Toady
• Bastards

I'm not a huge fan of creating large armies (the main reason I gravitate to skirmish size games) as I don't have the attention span or patience to continue an idea or scheme for the amount of time that requires. The above list meant that I would have to craft 22 models which is more than enough for me. I actually ended up crafting 25 as I made some models to act as wound markers for the artillery gun.

So now I had the numbers this highlighted a couple of things. First it enabled me to figure out roughly how many miniatures I would need to order. I decided to utilise Perry Miniatures as the world of Turnip has a napoleonic essence to it and I believe they are the go to base models for Turnip regiments. While researching these models I found that there are some active resellers on ebay so while all in all you will end up paying more than for the box generally speaking each sprue is around £4 so for my purposes it was pretty cost effective. I think I used a mix of French, Austrian and British styled models. The second thing identifying the number of models needed brought to my attention was that I had nowhere near enough Ogor Mawtribe heads. 

Experimentation

Due to the nature of what I was trying to achieve I realized that to pump up the number of available heads I would probably need to have a go at casting more. I have attempted casting in the past I never really succeeded so this aspect daunted me slightly. However due to the nature of what I would be attempting, primarily fixing heads to eggs I worked out that I would be able to get away with creating one part molds as really all I needed where the faces. This actually ended up working very well as I could taper the back of the head to make adding them to the eggs much easier.

As well as the Ogor Mawtribe heads I also had some ogryn, bulgryn and giant heads so I decided to make casts of them all to see which sizes would work the best with the size of the eggs I had purchased. After mocking up some samples I reached out to people on IG to get some feedback on which ones I should use primarily considering the fodder units of my regiment. The poll returned that the Ogor Mawtribe (bottom left) faces seemed to be the right size.

I realize at this point I have glossed over what you could consider the most important piece of this attempted build. Namely the eggs. The eggs are about 3.5x2.5 cm's and I acquired them from ebay. Upon receiving them I encountered an aspect I hadn't considered, this being that they are made of Styrofoam. As you all know generally when kit bashing, plastic cement and super glue are a hobbyists best friend. Unfortunately both of these products would just eat straight through the foam eggs. I decided to do two things to counter this. Rather than attaching the faces directly to the eggs surface I hollowed out part of the egg allowing the faces to sit slightly recessed. I then opted to use wood glue to attach the faces to the foam egg. I was actually surprised how well this worked. It may seem silly but I think we can get so focused on how we are "supposed" to hobby that thinking outside of the box doesn't occur naturally and this has completely opened my eyes.

With my first face attached I mocked up a model with the perry miniature parts and bluetac.

Even though the wood glue held the face in place pretty well I wasn't confident this approach would produce a something stable enough for the other parts I would need to attach to the model. I reached out to my friends on The Weald discord to see if anyone had any possible solutions for this issue. Kamigoye suggested potentially using modelling compound to seal the egg before attaching the legs, arms and other gubins. So with this advice I ordered some modelling compound as well as some plaster of paris and applied each of these to a model.

To aid with attaching the arms and legs ect.. I used the old baking powder and supper glue tactic which worked really well.

I couldn't decide which texture I liked more and so again reached out to IG to get other opinions which resulted in me taking an approach of applying both techniques to different models. As I proceeded on with building the rest I started to lean towards preferring the effect the plaster of paris had. I found that if I got the consistency just right it would leave a very smooth texture which could then be altered. To alter it I used a combination of sand and crackle paint (applying a gloss varnish to the egg before applying the crackle paint. With these three techniques I was happy with the over all result and look of my humpty dumptys.

Now I had two models built, only another 22 to go! I quickly discovered that kits I had bought from perry miniatures were maybe not going to work as well as I had thought. A majority of the arm options where in a configuration where both are holding the rifle, unfortunately attaching these to the eggs seemed to be difficult and so I opted for adjusting the arm holding the rifle and casting the one arm I had which was free. To do this though I had to now do a two part mold. 

As with the single part mold I was using bluestuff (a thermosetting plastic) as the mold, and miliput resin as the casting medium. My two biggest take aways from this process are thus:

• When created the first part of the mold make good locator holes by pushing the end of a paint brush or pen into a section of the blue stuff.
• Let the first part of the mold fully set before applying the second side.

Following both of these rules I was able to make reasonable two part molds of the arm and the casts turned out so so. They looked enough like an arm for my purposes.

The Build

So now I had the parts I needed and a methodology to apply to my eggs. The rest should be simple. It more or less was, I was able to quite quickly assemble the rest of my fodder. 

As you can see the above picture the models are sat in a movement tray. Playing mostly small skirmish games movement tray where something I hadn't really thought about in much depth. While looking to buy some I remembered that I had bought a ton of mdf coasters for use in a terrain project. I decided that rather than buying them I would build my own.

To create the movement trays I first trimmed down some 5mm poster board and cut holes which the bases of the models would sit in. I then glued this to the mdf with pva glue and let it dry. I then applied decorators caulking to sections and went over it with a wet texture roller to create cobble stones. Once this has dried I glued grit to the sections where I hadn't applied the caulking.

Once all of this was dry I primed it, dry brushed it and glued coir and static grass to the sections with grit. You will be able to see the overall result further down in this post.

So now I had my fodder and their movement trays built I moved on to my bastards. The bastards are mounted units and the process was pretty much the same except that as well as attaching the face in the way previously described I also attached the legs in this fashion. While dry fitting I had found that the eggs needed to sit a little high on their mounts and so by attached the legs as one piece at the bottom of the egg I was able to accommodate this requirement. 

Again I followed a similar process as above to create the movement trays.

Once I was happy with how my Bastards where looking I moved on to the stumpgun. 

The stumpgun has no movement stat as it is a static model and I wanted to capture this in the model while maintaining the humpty dumpty theme. I also wanted to utilize additional models to act as the crew for the stumpgun as well as wound markers. I decided that using a movement tray to create a semi diorama collecting all of this together would allow for greater creative opportunity.

The way I settled on depicting the stumpguns lack of movement was to have it placed within a cart. To create the cart I simple used coffee stirrers, some round bits of plastic for the wheels and wood glue.

I had seen the rattling gun from the stormvermin and decided this would add to the wacky nature of this model. I wanted to build on that so I used an ammo chain made out of flexible resin to be the feed to the gun. The chain would feed back into an ammo crate at the back of the cart. I opted for chopping up bit's of cocktail sticks to represent loose ammo in the crate (don't ask me how it attaches to the chain, just believe that it does).

To further build on the direction of the stumpgun and utilize the movement tray I modelled more ammo crates to the movement tray and then for two of the crew I had them passing ammo crates to the next and for the third crew member I modelled it tipping loose ammo into the back of the cart.

I wanted the crew members to have a more runtish appearance to represent their lower status within the regiment and so I used slightly smaller eggs and also the bulgryn faces which are smaller than the Ogor Mawtribes. Across all models including the larger stumpgun I maintained the size of the arms and legs because A. I thought this was funny and B. it was the easiest option.

So with the stumpgun completed I was up to 22 models and on to the final stretch which comprised of the two Toadies and the Toff.

Since the Toff and Toadies represent the commanders within the regiment I wanted them to stand out. I had the idea that they should have a higher intelligence than the rest of the humpty dumpty's. One way I chose to depict this was by using scale model heads as opposed to Ogor or Ogryn as the more realistic human faces in my opinion could be considered as looking more intelligent or refined. 

The challenge I encountered with this was I could not create good molds of the more realistic faces with the bluestuff and resin. I tried using plater of paris and got slightly better results but they still weren't ideal. My solution to my lack of ability is one that I apply to many areas of my life, story telling. I decided to expand on the concept that the Toff and Toady's where more intelligent by exploring the possibility that where a different species to the humpty's. They where far weaker (decided to use the smaller eggs I had used for the runts) but had that higher degree of intelligence. I landed on the idea that they had used their intelligence to survive by infiltrating the humpty's by dressing up like them.

So with this background I was able to instead of embedding the faces into the egg instead I used the original entire head and mounted it to the top. The effect this created is one of a person wearing an egg costume as opposed to actually being some sentient egg styled creature. 

The Toff would be leading the fodder and stumpgun so I was happy for him to remain on foot however each Toady would lead a unit of Bastards and so I wanted them to be mounted however I wanted to further differentiate them. To this end I decided that they should be getting piggy backs from actually humpty's. In retrospect I wish I had configured them the other way round, the Bastards riding humpty's and the Toady's riding horses (The pain of never being satisfied) however I am still very happy with the models themselves.

Paint Job

At this stage I was ready to prime and paint the models. I thought about a few different paint schemes but the one constant was that I wanted to achieve a reasonably realistic looking egg shell.

For this I colour matched against a regular house hold egg a mix of air paints needed to apply a zenithal to the models. Once happy I sprayed up the models as the start to the eggshell base coat. I wasn't entirely happy with the tone of the eggs shell but decided I wanted to continue moving forward and so drybrushed them with a light cream paint speckled the shells with a dark brown paint and a tooth brush. At this stage I decided that I wanted a darker look to the eggs and so washed them with light tone from the army painter. At this point I was very happy with the end result.

With the shells completed I then had the question of what to do with the faces. Should I leave them the same colour as the egg shell or try to differentiate? I opted for mimicking a very defined style of make up, the white powdered faces and rouged cheeks of the Victorian era. To achieve this effect I used a white pigment powder, then applied a pinkish colour to wear the cheeks would be and then applied some more pigment powder. Again through the power of story's I developed the idea that while the Toff was mimicking the humpty's by wearing a shell the humpty's looking to mimicking their betters started wearing the white face powder and rouge. 

I then progressed on to base coating the rest of the models with various colours, dry brushing them with their lighter versions and then applying a wash. As far as paint schemes go it was simple, fast and easy.

For basing the models I used the same effects applied to the movement trays, grit, coir, static grass, texture applied cobblestones.

With these my entire 25 model regiment was complete!

Outro

In summary this project is probably really the first time I have truly explored the notion of hobbying exactly the way I wanted to and disregarding all of the perceived norms. From using materials such as foam and plaster of paris, to not getting hung up on the minuscule details but instead focusing on the overall impact of the models.

This has been a truly enjoyable journey and I very much intend to take the skills and philosophy I have acquired along the way with me into my future projects. 

So next week (work permitting) I will be writing the second entry focused on these models. I will detail the lore about these specific characters but also their world in general.

Thanks for reading!