A forest encounter lives or dies on variety — the party should never quite know whether they're walking into an ambush, a territorial dispute, or something far stranger lurking between the trees. This week's five picks cover the full spread, from brute predators to cunning raiders to the kind of curveball that'll genuinely make your table laugh before things get dangerous. You can browse everything we stock for woodland tables over in our Forest Encounter Miniatures collection, but these are the five we'd reach for first.
Bear Bundle Miniature
Bears are one of those forest staples that never feel cheap when you actually put a physical model on the table, and the Bear Bundle from Tytan Troll gives you a genuinely solid set to work with across different encounter sizes and threat levels. Whether you're running a solitary apex predator or a small family group that the party has accidentally cornered, having multiple bear models at hand lets you scale the danger on the fly. It arrives in grey resin, ready to prime and paint however your setting demands.
Ravok The Warbringer Gnolls Miniature
Gnolls are a brilliant choice for a forest raider encounter, and Ravok The Warbringer from Golden Thief Studio is clearly built to lead them — the name alone signals a boss-tier model that deserves its own moment at the table. Drop him as the mastermind behind a gnoll ambush on the road through the woods, with the party realising too late that the scouts they dealt with were just the opening move. You can grab Ravok The Warbringer in grey resin, ready to paint up in whatever colours suit your campaign's gnoll warband.
Ducks Miniature
Stay with us on this one — the Ducks set from Goons is genuinely one of our favourite forest encounter tools precisely because players never see it coming. A peaceful pond, a few ducks, and then something goes horribly wrong — whether that's an awakened familiar, a druid's animal spies, or just the moment the rogue tries to interact with wildlife and rolls badly. It's the kind of detail that makes a forest feel lived-in rather than a stage set, and it arrives in grey resin ready to paint.
Dryad Predators with Sythes Miniature
If you want an encounter that shifts the forest from threatening to genuinely sinister, the Dryad Predators with Sythes from Duncan Shadows are brilliant for exactly that — dryads reimagined not as neutral forest guardians but as active, armed hunters with clear intent. Use them as the consequence of a corrupted grove, a bargain gone wrong with the fey, or simply as the apex predators of an ancient woodland that predates any settlement nearby. They ship in grey resin, ready to prime and paint to whatever unsettling palette fits your table.
Kobold Miniature
Kobolds in a forest setting work brilliantly as the encounter the party underestimates right up until they're surrounded, and Duncan Shadows' Kobold Group Set gives you enough models to make that encirclement feel real on the table. Run them as trappers who've rigged a stretch of trail, or as the outriders of a larger underground nest that extends beneath the treeline. They arrive in grey resin and paint up quickly if you want to get a whole warband on the table fast.
Forest encounters are one of our favourite things to stock for, because the range of what can reasonably live in a woodland is so wide — it's genuinely one of the more fun collections to build out. If you end up using any of these at your table, we'd love to hear how it went, especially if the ducks caused chaos.