Rooting Around - Turnip28 Spring Clean Challenge

Churned mud and swampland stretches out into the gloom. Thick fog hangs heavy in the air. Rolling barrows loom out of the murk. A strange root writhes underfoot. 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, infesting their thoughts with divine visions of lost vegetables. Bizarre religious orders have formed. They stockpile abandoned weapons unearthed by the twisting roots. 

Marching in column under fluttering banners, brandishing mud-clogged muskets and rusted bayonets, they are cruel parodies of long-forgotten armies on the march.

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

Turnip28 is a weird postapocalyptic wargame that combines Napoleonics with root vegetables, created and developed by Max FitzGerald (with free rules available at his Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/Turnip28). It is a setting that encourages and embraces players to kitbash together odd, root-tangled soldiers.

Kitbashing is not something I’ve done a lot of in the past. I had a lot of fun building some Napoleonic French zombies for the Silver Bayonet, and wanted to try something else, with the setting of Turnip28 grabbing my attention the most. So I picked up a few things around Autumn last year with the intention of getting going, but I stalled due to other ongoing projects.

Enter the 2023 Spring Clean Challenge – a perfect time to revisit the idea.