Randle's Folly

artist's conception of the horrid experience endured by a survivor of Randle's Folly

In 1032 OC, the Imperial Army was in a very difficult spot: for 60-odd years, the rebels had had the upper hand by forcing the Imperial soldiers to hover close to the Erkenheld-Fethil border where they would be mercilessly picked off by the rebels guerrilla tactics. Army leaders were also feeling the impatience of the Queen and her royal advisors, who wanted to end the Border Wars as quickly as possible.

It was this mix of urgency and desperations, perhaps, that lead General Victor Alamacious Randle to undertake what had the potential to be a brilliant campaign that had the potential to change the course of the war. After capturing an elf in an attack on his encampment, Randle had some of his spies use various mean to gain valuable information from it - specifically , a hand-drawn map to the rebels' base of operations.

Randle ordered his entire battalion to enter the forest from various points meant to triangulate the rebels' camp. His plan was to rush in and take the camp with no prisoners and use it as a waystation for further exploration of the forest.

But the brilliant plan quickly turned into a terrible failure. The map hand been drawn as if well-beaten paths existed, which should have made storming the camp in such a quick and coordinated fashion easy to do, but no Imperial soldiers found anything but dense undergrowth and nearly impenetrable vegetation. The rebels presumably used the soldiers' disortented state and isolation from one another to their advantage - though no bodies were found after the failed attempt, few men stumbled out of the forest of the next few days. And few of those men were sane enough to speak coherently.

What happened to the men who survived Randle's Folly is not clear, and dependent on the trustworthiness of terrified and now paranoid soldiers. Randle's Folly marks a major defeat for Elothnin, both in terms of the material loss of soldiers and a huge drop in morale.

See Also:
Eldernoth Furbolg