I had an interesting dream recently that gave me what I think is a neat idea for a dungeon location: The Orchard of Time.

History

It’s started out as your standard divine orchard, a bit like the Garden of the Hesperides. It was owned and operated by a powerful spirit or minor deity, and its trees gave fruit that ranged from “mundane but high-quality” to “outright miraculous” the further in you went. If you got to the very center, you could harvest the Peaches of Immortality or something equally awesome.

Something happened to the Orchard’s original owners and they left, abandoning the place. Monstrous fauna from the surrounding regions moved in and either overwhelmed the previous guardians or entered some sort of symbiosis with them. These new monsters found ample food in the trees of the Orchard, whose energies mutated them to be larger and stronger.

One day, a powerful arch-wizard found the Orchard’s location and decided to go for the Peaches. This extremely arrogant individual was sure he would succeed where all others have failed. After all, the others weren’t him! He armed himself with his best spells and his best magic items, and teleported to the Orchard’s entrance (can’t teleport into it from outside). Then he boldly strode past the gate, and cast his most powerful magic.

This was a custom spell that would stop time everywhere in the Orchard except for an area five meters or so in radius around the wizard himself. The idea was that, with time stoped, the archmage could just walk up to the really good trees in the center while dodging the place’s many inhabitants. If he needed to remove any of them, he could bring them into the “active time” circle and use his other magic to handle them one individual or small group at a time.

Of course, the wizard’s hubris got the better of him at exactly the worst time. Maybe he had miscalculated when creating the spell, or maybe he made a critical error when casting it. The fact is that our wizard just kinda… exploded, leaving behind only his ornate metal staff.

Ironically, the spell itself worked exactly as planned. Even better in fact, as the same error that deleted our wizard made it last forever. It’s centered on the wizard’s staff, which stands planted on the ground just inside the Orchard’s entrance gate.

Layout and Hazards

The Orchard is located in a hidden valley and is bordered by tall forested mountains. The climate can range from temperate to tropical depending on what kind of fruit you want it to contain. As mentioned above, vestigial divine wards prevent people from finding it with divination or from teleporting into it from outside. It can still be found via good old-fashioned research, as its location is recorded in ancient religious texts and in the unfortunate wizard’s own notes. The wizard has also helpfully dispelled any magical defenses that prevented people from just walking through the main gate.

The Orchard of Time was a little overgrown from its period of abandonment, but still retains its characteristic layout. There are many trees but they’re spaced far apart. Cobbled paths wind their way among them. Grass and other wild plants reach up to a human’s knees between the trees and paths. This space used to be taken up by a lawn and flower beds, but these have been overwhelmed by native plants.

This means that despite covering a very large area, the Orchard has excellent sight lines and a clearly navigable layout. You can see a good deal of its significant landmarks from the entrance gate and it’s impossible to get lost inside. These excellent sight lines work against intruders such as the PCs, because they allow the many, many monsters and guardians that live here to see them from far away. These creatures are all hostile, territorial, and generally incapable of dialogue either because they have animal intellect or because they’re some sort of construct. In the dream I had these monsters definitely included a variety of Rodents of Unusual Size. There are almost more monsters than there are fruit, and they all more or less converge on the location of any intruders they can perceive.

Or they would, if time hadn’t stopped inside. The wizard’s staff is just inside the entrance, and it projects a field of “normal time” in a 5-meter radius around itself. Everything outside this bubble and inside the orchard’s outer walls is frozen in time, and has been for a long time (decades? centuries?).

PCs who want to succeed where the arrogant wizard failed need to carry the staff with them. Getting close enough to a monster that it enters the “bubble” will unfreeze the creature, and it will imediately attack. There might be a route that allows them to avoid most of the creatures, but not all.

In addition to the copious monsters, the permanent time stop might have created hazardous areas inside the Orchard, where space or time itself behave in harmful ways. These might be almost impossible to detect until they’re inside the active time bubble, which would make them reveal themselves in a dramatic fashion.

Why go there?

The most obvious reason to delve the Orchard of Time is to get its most awesome fruits from the big trees at the center, like the wizard wanted to do. The Orchard might also contain buildings of interest (such as libraries or treasure vaults), along with the bodies of ancient adventurers who tried to delve the place before the ill-fated wizard. Some of these might be legendary themselves, and have died carrying their equally legendary gear.

A slightly alternate Orchard would have been invaded by the wizard while it was still operational! In this case it’s going to be in pristine condition, with all of its original guardians and security systems still in place. Even its owners will still be around, frozen in time like flies in amber. Freeing them is an excellent goal for more heroic sorts, or at least for sorts who need the specific help whose divine entities are able to provide.

However, since those owners are frozen in time, they’re still going to be under the impression that they’re being invaded by a cheeky wizard. And look at you, carrying his staff around like that. Better talk fast!