on the origin of rangers
- In 493 CE, when King Herbert was embattled with his war against the Scotti tribes, he found himself in need of an intelligence force. He had to know how to navigate the wild, uncultivated lands of northern Araluen, had to know the movement of enemy troops that disappeared inside whiteouts and reemerged to decimate his army.
- At first, he tried to use the cavalry as forward scouts; notable figures from this time period include Sir Arthur Altman, a young lieutenant who nearly ran into a Scotti patrol and followed them through the snowstorm for five kilometers, learning of a crucial Scotti surprise attack and warning his King.
- Later cavalry attempted to copy his technique of approaching through the concealment of a snowstorm, but this proved to be ineffective. Their horses would slip on ice patches and rock falls, resulting in broken legs and often death. Another issue was visibility, which was poor for the scouts as well as for the enemy.
- By this time, a special unit had been formed inside the cavalry corps dedicated to reconaissance only, but there was still a long way to go until the formation of the Rangers as we know today.
- Herbert ordered use of smaller, more sure-footed horses in 494 CE, but found that the majority of the horses in the army were unsuited for the task. Only battlehorses were trained for use in battle, but battlehorses were large and unwieldy. Smaller horses didn’t have the fitness or the instincts required to face armed soldiers.
- The unit was forced to make do with what they had. Meanwhile, the use of unseen movement was starting to catch on, but no one knew how to do it. It was a full six months before Herbert thought to recruit common woodsmen, hunters, and trackers: all people who were used to moving through forests and tracking quarry in relative silence.
- Coupled with the slightly smaller, slightly stealthier horses, they had marginally greater success than their cavalry counterparts. Enough success, at least, that after the formation of modern Araluen, Herbert decided to establish them as an official Corps: the Rangers.
- Around the turn of the century (500 CE), the patterned cloak came into use through a mere coincidence. The Corps’ seamstresses had run out of green dye in a year with an influx of apprentices, all of whom needed new cloaks. They managed to scrape by until they get to the last apprentice, and there simply isn’t enough green wool to make a new cloak. Instead, the seamstresses used a mixture of brown and green wool, mottling the pattern throughout in hopes of making the brown less noticeable.
- The phenomenon that many are familiar with today (the “shimmering” effect that Ranger cloaks seem to give off) was discovered later that week by the boy’s mentor. Amazed, the Ranger went back to the seamstresses and requested a cloak exactly like that of his apprentice. This happy accident and subsequent discovery revolutionized unseen movement inside the Ranger Corps. Even today, the concept of the camouflage cloak is absolutely unique to Araluen.
- Of course, the school of unseen movement—like everything else about the Corps—still had a long way to go. There were still reports of Rangers breaking cover like “frightened deer” at the Battle of Agencort in 538 CE. Clearly, the techinques remained unrefined, passed down as they were from mentor to apprentice.
- It is uncertain at the time of writing how many of the modern techniques came to be, but many postulations have been made.