There were worse things than crucifixion. There were teeth.
- Stephen King, The Strand
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action shot of the teeth swamp
(in a forthcoming battle report) |
Having
finished the Death Guard a few months ago, I decided that the next project would be making some terrain for Turnip 28. I've got mountains of terrain-making supplies, but it's something that gives me
a lot of anxiety, being so far out of my wheelhouse. I've been planning terrain for the desert board that my Mantis Warriors would fight over for half a decade, accumulated tons of stuff for it, and am frightened like a little baby.
Turnip provides a way to do this kind of work in a fun, relaxing way, knowing that it's okay to screw up -- that's what the mud is for! Of course, it's still taken me like four years to turn teeth and horrible fingers into actual stuff that goes on a board. In that time, the 'swamp teeth' aesthetic has turned into one of the cornerstones of the Turnip 28 vibe. You see it everywhere - well, fuckers, I had the idea very early! Probably not first, but very very early! I'm just chicken!
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cyclopean shepherd stands atop a sunken house
(in a forthcoming battle report) |
Anyway, the time finally came to bite the bullet. I snuffled through the
rulebook and scenario pamphlet that Max has put together and put together a list of core terrain and a few would-like-to-haves. Some of those haven't eventuated (I wanted to build a sunken windmill and a few terrace houses), but I now have a core list of pieces, which will cover the generic scenarios and some of the weirdo ones:
Impassable Terrain (6x6")
Defensible Terrain (6 x 6")
Dangerous Terrain (9x 9")
Tooth Pits (in three pieces)
Normal Swamps but with Weird Guys (in three pieces)
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a pus sheep hangs out at the edge of a tooth wall
from - that's right, a forthcoming battle report |
As is traditional, I will go through these in the order I actually finished them. As is not traditional, I'll include a bit more discussion on how I made them and include some WIP photos as we go - so this is going to be a long post!
Walls/Cover
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| wattle fences, as well as a Biting Pear |
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| tooth-and-gum walls |
The largest challenge for these pieces was finding basing. I think I like my terrain based, and I haven't really enjoyed doing it on foamboard pieces - probably because I'm lazy and don't cut properly, but it always comes out a bit... bad. And, no, I neither own nor have space for a jigsaw, so don't give me that 'cut your own mdf basing' bit. Anyway, these were easy, at least -
warbases.co.uk sell 25 x 150mm bases which are perfect.
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| works-in-progress |
Not really a lot else to say. I built the gums up with some milliput; the teeth are cheap Chinese things from ebay that you can find with an obvious search; the weapons and detritus are combinations of leftover spears, toothpicks, and a helmet made out of putty. The wattle fences are Renedra, available from all good wargaming webstores.
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| me thumb |
You all remember
Ursula Vernon's Biting Pear of Salamanca, of course. I had some leftover putty and was randomly inspired. It doesn't actually have any teeth, but I did sculpt some vague shapes and fill them with blood. Same thing, really.
Dangerous Terrain: Normal Swamps but with Weird Guys
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| Normal Swamps but with Weird Guys |
These were the first pieces I actually put putty on a board to make, but took a little longer to actually finish. Together, they form one roughly 9x9" piece of dangerous terrain. In games other than Turnip, I'd spread them out a bit and let them muddy up a, say, Mordheim or Death Guard-inspired board. They're fundamentally just swamps only with, you know, weird guys.
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| skull swamp |
The white fungal strands were done using a technique from one of the Turnip magazines. They're just paperclip pieces bent into shape, slathered a few times with Citadel's Stirland Mud, and then drybrushed up through layers of white. The mud is Vallejo's Russian Thick Mud; the water AK's Swamp Green Water Gel. Simple and effective.
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| frog swamp |
I can't for the life of me remember where I got the frog from. I thought it was Crooked Dice but -- oh, wait, it's
Diehard Miniatures. No idea why I have him - maybe a freebie from a kickstarter? He's a great sculpt. I accidentally undercoated him black, then hit him with a flesh tone and worked up through whites. Using Contrast on his great seeing eye means that he has two shades across the pupil and 'whites' - a really pleasant surprise (see below).
The reeds are from old paintbrushes and a shitty cheap plastic brush I bought at the local $2 shop.
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| creep swamp |
Creep swamp! I was browsing
Eureka Miniatures, as you do, and stumbled over their
Creep range. Perfect for this project, yeah? The pads and tiny horrible guys all come from that. The swamp bubbles are nail art bling, by a company called craftershoice which I bought at Spotlight - I imagine you foreign types have your own local craft store equivalents. Michaels or whatever.
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| creeps |
I've really gotten a lot of practice at painting tiny eyeballs lately.
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| frog |
Some of the greens on the (piece of bark) stone come from Vallejo's Moss and Lichen effect paint - though be very careful, because it is fucking bright and vibrant as hell. It can be quite startling.
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| very first base |
I wasn't really sure how to build up the borders on these. I experimented with just sand and PVA as per
How to Make Wargames Terrain. Although it does result in fairly shallow 'land' layers, once the mud goes on in the end, it's pretty good.
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| experimenting with ways to do mud |
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| accidental skull |
You can see here that I tried a couple different ways. The 'skull' piece - which, I have to note, was a total accident. I just wanted 'some wet bits, some land' and this is what happened - was done by gluing down twisted up bits of aluminium foil. This looked terrible, so I layered it in Mod Podge. This just made the alfoil glossy, so I hit it with Stirland Mud, which is a bit wasteful to do
before undercoating. Learning!
Other pieces used spakfilla to build up the bases, which works as well but still needs layering in something like Mod Podge, PVA glue, and/or Stirland Mud to hold it all into place. It's all much of a muchness once you cover the whole thing in Russian Mud.
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| AK Water Gel Swamp Green drying stages |
The water is just AK Swamp Green. It's a fun paste that's easy to use, although it doesn't really look to me like actual swamp water - I've used it on Necromunda bases for a kind of Sump effect. Here, it's for Fantasy Nightmare Water, so it works fine.
Dangerous Terrain: Tooth Pits
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| tooth swamps |
Again, together these form a rough 9x9" piece of dangerous terrain. I'm not sure where these bases came from, now that I'm writing this. Some are from warbases (as with the walls), especially
their swamp bases, but I think I sourced some of the others from local vendors. The teeth are the same stash of teeth from ebay I've had for years; the rusted bits from the bitz box, and the weird pineapple fungus things are things I found at the local craft store. Lips are gums are, of course, putty, with toothbrush or terrible plastic cleaning brush reeds.
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| bleh! |
I don't think I need to go into details on how I painted these! It's obvious!
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| dentures |
I wanted this one to feel a bit different, so the swamp has some flesh... dimples? And is missing a few teeth, so some helpful locals have jammed some old weapons into it. That's nice of them.
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| toff-eye view |
This one is smiling way too big. A few bits of rusting detritus to really emphasise how dangerous it is and to help scale it.
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| turnip-eye view |
The drooling strands are UHU glue, and I'm pretty sure they are all going to shatter in transport very quickly. Such is life.
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| details |
Dangerous Terrain: Tooth Swamp |
| visit the famous tooth pits! |
I've had this in my head to do for
fucking ages and it came out pretty well, I think! This one is
a two-part forest base from Brutal Cities, which allows us to have that two-level effect, although I did use
so much of my mud on this base. Flesh and goo made from milliput again, and some of it with experimenting with Vallejo's plastic putty tube to create strings of horrible flesh. This is the most fun ever, and I recommend it.
The little sad trees you see here and there were made with twists of twine. I tried to stiffen them up with successive layers of Mod Podge and this did not work at all, but I'm okay with them being a little sad - they aren't the point of the piece.
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| b l o o d |
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| pitted pit |
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| meat pit |
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| healthy gums |
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| leaky |
I did try to have one pit filled with water (Vallejo's Water Effects) but sadly two sheets of mdf glued together with PVA isn't watertight. Weird. So I reapplied some mud and chalked it up to experience. The final effect (above) looks great in the end, so it all works out. something something bob ross.
Impassable Terrain: Rotting Fish
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| big fish |
One of my favourite scenarios in Turnip 28 is 'Gone Fishin', wherein the turnips are spat up by a big fish and then fight. Very funny. It requires a piece of impassable terrain to be the Fish. And, conveniently,
Archon Studio has a set called Swamps of Doom which features a giant rotting fish. Hell yeah. (it comes with some other stuff, which I'll use elsewhere, don't worry)
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| shiny |
A friend of mine had the greatest idea of how to paint this terrain piece:
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| The Rainbow Fish, Marcus Pfister |
If those kids hadn't bullied him for being different, he wouldn't have overeaten all those turnips.
Defensible Terrain: Sunken House and Ruin
I built these together, even though they came out very differently, so let's group them together.
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| a classic sunken house hill |
One of the distinct elements of Turnip 28 is the sunken house-as-a-hill, and really wanted to include one. I opened up my copy of
How to Make Wargames Terrain, grabbed a steel ruler and some foamboard, and drew up a crude village hut design. Twice (one of each piece!). I then hacked into it at an angle to get it to lie like this before going to add details.
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| drippy |
The crossbeams are all coffee stirrer sticks, and the 'dauby' aspects on the walls was done... with.... Stirland Mud, probably? Something just to murky it up a little. Gaps were filled with mud during the course of painting, or with putty as I made the roots squirming out of the gaps. The fungus strands were made to match the earlier swamps.
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| really fun textures |
Walls were various off-whites and dirty washes; the rest brown washes and greens and just having fun.
The roof was cardboard (thank you,
How to Make Wargames Terrain) and then covered in first mud and then tufts, with moss made using foliage clumps to go under the roof. In the end, really easy and so much fun.
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| moss |
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| so many tufts |
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| running out of caption ideas |
I'm counting it as defensive terrain, mostly because standing on a hill in a swamp can be a defensive position. It works.
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| hole |
The other ruin wound up being more traditional L-shaped ruins, partly because the idea of making L-shaped ruins for an indie game that specifically doesn't care about that shit is funny, but also to get a sense of what I'm doing. I did enjoy tearing pieces of card from the foamboard to expose the 'foam' and then carving the bricks with a pen. That's delightful.
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| fungal |
Most of the detritus is random shit from my piles of garbage used for basing the Death Guard, with a few tiles here and there. The stakes are leftover from the Perry's Agincourt infantry and a few cocktail spikes. The goo is UHU again. Great stuff. I did use Mod Podge to protect the foam before undercoating.
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| spikes |
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| flooded |
It was lacking a little something, so I decided to flood the piece with swamp water and a few spots of gloss varnish, but mostly this thing came together in the construction of it.
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| the little vine was fun |
The vine on the wall here is another bit of glued-down twine.
Dangerous Terrain: Finger Forest
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| finger forest |
I backed
Wilhelm's Mutant Marshes ages ago, and have been intending to use them for this purpose ever since, so I'm so pleased I finally painted them! And they were
fucking fun as hell. Not a lot to say, admittedly. The
base is another from Brutal Cities, and I used the spare bases from the Tooth Pits for the extra trees here.
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| WIP to show the gloop details - including some nail bling to raise parts of the board |
The extra goopus and flesh undergrowth is all putty - as is the second Biting Pear.
Impassable Terrain: Drowned Tower
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| drowned, shattered tower and the new tenant |
While I had originally intended to do a shattered windmill or similar, by the stage of the project I was feeling a bit worn out. It was taking longer than expected and I was - am - getting a little sick of only painting mud every day. Break time is over! I want to paint a colour again!
But I only had one piece of impassable terrain and wanted at least one more. Something that can go with the ruined cottages - maybe a shattered watchtower that's now flooded! and it can have a weird horrible guy in it, like in some of Max's art! Yeah!
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| from the other side |
I'll go into detail in some of the WIP photos below, but I also wanted to try out some techniques I'd heard of involving air-drying clay to draw on bricks. So I decided to try this guy out. I bought a two-piece swamp base in a similar design as the above forest bases (this one is from
Battle Kiwi), grabbed one of the Pringles tubes I had handy and off we went.
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| out back |
Painting was the layers of drybrushing you'd expect, along with washes of every kind - there's some orange, blue, red, purple, several greens and browns, black, some Vallejo Moss & Lichen effect, some moss tufts, some more drybrushing. You get it.
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| flotsam and jetsam |
Weirdo Goo Bits in the flooded courtyard. During construction, I wound up smothering these in so much Mod Podge that they lost all individuality and became Rough Weird Thingies which, while a little annoying, was still functionally what I had planned for them anyway. I painted some rusty, some like old bone, some like Horrible Flesh as per the other pieces, and some like mud.
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| literally just hangin' out |
The turnip was a core of foil layered in milliput and some green stuff and/or milliput tendrils. I
should have used wires, and this guy is absolutely going to break apart whenever I move him. The eyestalks are, in fact, wires, with bead eyeballs.
The horrible mouth is just green stuff, roughly shaped and then painted like bloody, fluid-filled flesh. It's a turnip, after all.
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| hi :) |
The skin is off-whites, with a purple wash for the top half. Bloody flesh mouth, like I said, and then mucky greens (base colour is Garaghak's Sewer, actually) for the stalks. I think he's come up great, and it's a shame he's almost certainly doomed to break in transit.
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| removable |
He is removable, originally for use in non-Turnip games but, honestly, he'd work as a Nightmarish Thing In The World in almost every setting where the tower itself works. This piece works perfectly in Mordheim as-is.
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| well, it is |
As part of using this to experiment, I used Vallejo Plastic Putty to try and seal the two parts of the base a little better this time. The bases also got built up using spakfilla, but I didn't bother with Stirland Mud or anything, as the Russian Mud covered all that in the end (though I did have to buy a new one!).
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| you can really see the bits here |
The clay construction works really well, if you like getting your hands completely fucking coated in red-brown clay. It's fucking fun as hell (and do it outside) - however, the clay
will try to come away from your unwashed and unprepared Pringles can when it's dry.
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| bonus shot of Arthur's feet apparently |
You can probably do something to make the surface stickier, but I just coated the whole thing in Mod Podge and PVA glued any bits that fell off back into place. Simple - but Mod Podge does 'blunt' the sharp edges. This works for something that's supposedly an ancient broken ruin, flooded and worn by the ages, but for anything you want to remain crisp, it's a concern.
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| clay |
Really can't emphasise how much messy fun this is.
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| more clay |
You can see here the courtyard detritus was intended to be a little more distinct. You can also see one of my favourite pieces of detritus - bits of dried paint from the lids of pots.
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| initial turnip work |
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| turnip and putty and initial eyestalks - covered in Mod Podge here |
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| layering on Vallejo water effects |
I actually finished most of the work on this tower a few weeks ago, but the Vallejo Still Water is refusing to dry. It's not really seeping out the way it did in the Tooth Swamp, although it is going... down. Somewhere. Just not solidifying. So I've given up on waiting and am just drawing a line under this thing. If the drowned courtyard in future photos looks greener, then just know that I gave up and used the AK swamp effect instead, in the end.
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| action shot! (forthcoming) |
So about sixteen pieces of terrain, all up, depending on how you count, and enough to run most games of Turnip 28 (except some of the more insane scenarios). I did want to do some guys for Swill and some terrain and ships for Scabz, but I'm feeling a bit worn out on mud for the time being. Max's own ambivalence about Swill means that I might shelf the miniatures for now until it's further along.
But I was able to play my first game, using some of this terrain, last weekend, and a battle report is coming up soon. It was fun as hell, a really great game, so do expect to see more Turnip content soon...
