The Cave of Wasted Time

Well I had a fairly strange D&D session this week and I'm still not sure how I feel about. We spent the entire session inside a cave wasting time. I call it The Cave of Wasted Time. The actual cave name was much more promising "The Cave of Hoarding" but wildly misleading because there wasn't jack shit inside this cave. Well not totally true but pretty damn close.

My group has been sorely hurting for coin and loot through out this campaign. We just hit level 9 and we have around 100 gold and one magic item from the entire campaign. To make it even better the magic item is a single sending stone which lets us communicate with our tribe. Being slightly lost on what we should do and in desperate need of some gear upgrades we headed straight to The Cave of Hoarding with an entire village worth of people in tow. The village is a group that we saved from under the tyrannical thumb of the ruling giants in the area and are currently escorting them to some of our tribemates so that they can go live with our tribe. So we set the Cave of Hoarding as our meet up point and decided to venture inside while we waited for the escort to arrive.

The journey into the cave felt very ominous, we knew we were headed into the den of a great beast. We slowly inched our way down the tunnels leading deeper and deeper underground. After about an hour of travel we ran into an unnatural cliff and an enormous chasm extending as far as the eye could see in all directions. My character is a druid so I shapeshifted and began exploring the chasm. I couldn't find anything heading up, anything heading across so the group decided we should head downwards. As we reached the bottom of the chasm to discovered the ground to be littered with an excessive amount of bones, now we knew for sure something bad was going to happen. Slowly our group carefully explored the area, no exits, no buildings, no monsters, nothing. Feeling a bit disappointed we decided to begin excavating the area to see what was under the bones. After a brief dig, we hit a scaled surface. Nervous and excited we examined the scales and decided it must be a dragon in a deep slumber on top of its massive hoard of treasure. We excavated a bit more and as nothing happened began to get a bit frustrated. We were stabbing weapons into the scales, using spells to obliterate the ground and expose the dragon, casting spells to hurt the dragon and nothing happened. Finally our party decided to do a full excavation and discover exactly what was under the bone. Fast forward several day and we had exposed a long snakelike tube that was absolutely enormous. Nothing we did could disturb or penetrate the scales and with no body parts in sight we began to give up.

Our escort had arrived by this point and we were giving up. Nothing had worked and we were out of ideas. Going out on a limb I decided to cast animal friendship on the humongous scaled creature just to see if anything happened and it worked. Finally something had happened in The Cave of Wasted Time! I quickly cast beast bond so that I could communicate with the beast. Want to know what happened next? More wasted time, our group learned the objects had creatures trapped inside and that was about it. Maybe I was asking the wrong questions or maybe the DM was just trying to steer the stubborn group into a obvious deadend. Ethier way we wasted a lot of time.