Hah! My players got through a couple of the duergar encounters, but they've encountered so many awakened animals that it's become a running theme, and the party druid - who rejected an Auril druid's attempts at recruitment - is starting to feel personally targeted.
One of the funniest of those moments was from the random wilderness encounters. I rolled an encounter at night, that would feature an awakened animal, and the randomly-rolled animal I got to work with was... a snow hare. So I figured "okay, what the heck can a hare do to a 6th-level party?", and had it sneak in past their posted watch, acing its stealth checks, and tuck a chunk of chardalyn under the druid's pillow, giving him a random insanity when he woke up.
That hare had a charmed life. It was in and out of there without any trouble, and only got spotted the next night, when it came back and tried to slip some poison into their evening meal. And then it lasted two rounds of combat against the paladin who was on watch at the time, and managed to miss four greatsword attacks against it as it hopped away at its full 20-foot speed.
When he finally connected he sunk a max-level Smite into it just to make sure.