The air crackled with arcane energy as the heroes crept through the shadowy ruins, their hearts pounding in their chests as they prepared to confront the sinister cabal and thwart their apocalyptic ritual.

Requirements: Level 3

Description: You need to reach the ritual chamber, defeat the Acolytes and close the rift. The only entrance to the ritual chamber is a massive stone door (100HP, 20Hardness) with a DC 25 lock. To make things worse, it is guarded by a stone golem and a fireball trap (DC 25 spot, DC 25 disable device, 10d6+10 fire damage, DC 20, +10 spell resi penetration). Inside the chamber there is one acolyte per character. The Acolytes try to widen an interplanar rift that leads to the realms of chaos. The acolytes each use full round actions to make knowledge planes check (they have a +10 bonus) to widen the rift. On the other hand the characters can also try knowledge planes checks to narrow the rift. Each such check changes the rift width by the rolled amount in the desired direction. The rift starts at a width of 20 and the challenge is won, if the width drops below 0. Each round a sinister creature enter through the rift. Until the characters open the door, these creatures simply accumulate, afterwards they fight the characters. The type of creature depends on the width of the rift:

Rewards:

• 1 feat
• 4 attribute buy points
• 1 medium wonderous item per character