The forest map generator draws a woodland encounter site on five-foot squares, ready for the moment the party is ambushed on the road. A dirt path winds through from one edge of the sheet to the other, close-set trees crowd in on either side, and somewhere off the path there's a clearing with something in it: an abandoned camp with its fire and bedrolls, a ring of standing stones, or a wayside shrine. An old oak, far bigger than the rest, stands on its own. About four maps in ten have a stream running through, with a ford of stepping stones where the path crosses it. Every point of interest is numbered and keyed.
How the forest is drawn
The path is laid first, a gentle curve from one side of the sheet to the other, because a forest fight almost always starts on a road. The stream, when there is one, crosses the sheet in another direction; if the two meet, the ford goes exactly there. The clearing is placed well away from both, so it's a place the party has to choose to go into.
Then the trees fill in. They're denser away from the path and never stand in the water or the clearing, and their canopies overlap the way real woodland does, so the map reads as cover rather than a scatter of circles. Undergrowth bushes, a few boulders and a fallen log lying across the path finish the ground. The five-foot grid runs over everything.
Cover, terrain and line of sight
At battle-map scale, a forest is mostly about what blocks what. Tree canopies are cover and block line of sight; undergrowth is difficult terrain; the stream is difficult to cross anywhere but the ford; the fallen log is the obvious place for an archer to crouch. The path is the only open ground, which is exactly why bandits pick it. The keyed points give you somewhere for the encounter to be about: the camp somebody left in a hurry, the stones that hum after dark, the oak with something living in its roots.
Using it at the table
Drop the map on a virtual tabletop and you have a road ambush, a hunt, a fey encounter or a chase in the time it takes to download. It suits any fantasy game on a grid, D&D 5e and Pathfinder included, and works without the grid as a sketch of the scene for theatre-of-the-mind play. Roll a few in a row for a journey through the same woods; the path always runs edge to edge, so the maps chain together.
Free SVG and PNG downloads
Both formats are free for your games, streams and published adventures. The PNG is a 1920-pixel render for a VTT, and the Print button saves a black-and-white version for a home printer. The SVG is the original vector file: open it in Inkscape, Affinity or Figma to move trees, add a cart on the road or rename the clearing. Everything on the map is drawn by our own code, so there's no attribution to carry and no asset licence to read.
What it won't do
It draws one forest encounter site. It doesn't draw a whole forest region, buildings in the woods, or underground lairs. For the forest as part of a region, roll a hex map; for the ruin the path leads to, roll a ruins map.
Name the wood, then walk it
The forest name generator gives the wood a name and a history, and draws this same map beside its result. The river name generator does the same with a stream always running through. For other wild places, try the swamp map generator and the desert map generator.