School’s In For Summer! Pathfinder Lost Omens: Rival Academies Reviewed

Title: Pathfinder Lost Omens – Rival Academies

Publisher: Paizo Inc

Authors: Joshua Birdsong, Sharang Biswas, Jeremy Blum, Jessica Catalan, Carlos Cisco, Aoife Ester, Laura Lynn Horst, Stephanie Lundeen, Mahpiya, Andrew Mullen, Collette Quach, Mikhail Rekun, Erin Roberts, Mark Seifter, Navaar Seik-Jackson, Shahreena Shahrani, Kendra Leigh Speedling, Gina Susanna, Tan Shao Han, Esther Wallace, and Landon Winkle

Artists: Ekaterina Gordeeva, Çağdaş Demiralp, Anselmi Hyytinen, Bastien Jez, Sammy Khalid, Robert Lazzaretti, Renan Maurilio, Mirco Paganessi, Sandra Posada, and Riccardo Rullo

Year: 2025

Genre: Pathfinder Lost Omens volume focusing on the great schools of Golarion

Pages: 128 pages

MSRP: $49.99 for the softcover or grab the PDF for $29.99.

To put it succinctly, Rival Academies has a lot going on: school profiles, character backgrounds, items, spells, NPCs, a sort-of adventure, and more. There’s a lot packed into its 128 pages, most of it in the in-world perspective fans have come to know and love from the Lost Omens sourcebooks.

Rival Academies details six Golarion schools, including their culture, their students, and their interactions. It’s great to see the Magaambya featured here, but the other five educational institutions are just as compelling. Each school feels distinct, developed, and different. It’s not everyday, after all, that you encounter a university housed on the back of an enormous pachyderm who wanders the planes freely while its students are set seemingly impossible tasks to test their skillsets. Grades? Who needs’em.

What’s really delightful, however, is the decision to allow each school to leave comments in the sidebar, demonstrating the kinds of tensions, commonalities, and curiosities that exist among the students and professors of each institution. Layout-wise, this is handled elegantly enough to avoid a distraction.

While straight rivalries would have been easier, the path the Paizo team have chosen for Rival Academies is much richer and a far better basis for character creation, scenario development, and roleplay. The subtle humor that often permeates these comments – such as the exasperation in a school dealing in partial mechanical reanimation with one whose students do not always realize death on this plane is permanent – helps keep things solidly in the realm of good natured to bloodless. Sincere tensions are rooted in clear clashes of belief systems and ethics, but even then, no one here is trying to undermine anyone else – even if they don’t see eye-to-eye.

The mechanical additions are equally robust. New character backgrounds offer exciting new opportunities, both embracing academic stereotypes as well as bucking them. Notably, Paizo also offers its library-dwelling denizens an opportunity for an extra INT or CON point, catering to those who revel in their glass canon status, as well as those seeking to offset it.

The one point of confusion is the framing device: chiefly, a convocation of schools that is treated like a defined, playable event – right down to a guide for running it. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this; it would, after all, make a great plot hook for an Adventure Path, especially with the recent focus on the more social and diplomatic aspects of roleplaying in Pathfinder. Plot hooks are, of course, practically expected in a Lost Omens book, but such a clear adventure set-up feels a little out of place. There has been so much thought and care put into each school and their interactions that it almost feels like a missed opportunity not to capitalize on that, even in a more structured one-off. While the intent here to allow GMs to drop the event in as needed and as backdrop to play out an adventure as necessary, one can’t help but wish there was a little more structure.

All of that said, Rival Academies has plenty to please GMs and players alike. Its robust library of NPCs, character options, and treasure trove of worldbuilding make it a welcome entry into the Lost Omens line.