Herein lies the tale of my Samsaran Spiritualist's first (and last, probably) Psychic Duel.
Our 4th level party was asked by a high level priest to lie in wait and watch a meeting between him and someone he didn't trust, and to take action if the individual attacked him.
My spiritualist had just picked up the "instigate Psychic Duel" spell, and so, during our surprise round on the enemy (who drew a weapon to attack the priest, so as they say "it was on", I cast it, figuring it was effectively the best crowd control spell we had on hand.
Well, it turns out the mysterious stranger was a level 15 (!) Spellcaster, who failed the will save, and for the first round of combat I rolled abysmally awfully on initiative, while he rolled only a little better.
So the party was hacking away at him while he was flat footed, and his turn comes around. Cue a re-enactment of the first scene of the movie "Scanners" (Yes, THAT ONE ) and let's say my character was NOT Jack Nicolson's character) One 8th level spell slot and 16D6 untyped damage to my spiritualist, and both he and his phantom were, as they say, History.
OK, I did mention my character was a Samsaran, right? So when the priest tried to bring him back, his soul had, as per his race, already moved on.
The GM was unprepared for this (though he should have taken the possibility of the Samsaran going down into account in a level 15 VS level 4 fight) so he simply had the priest use Miracle to effectively undo the death.
Would this work? If so, what effect would it have on the Samsaran, whose spirit was reincarnated, then yanked out of its body and crammed back into its old one by a paradox-like divine equivalent of a wish?
Well, there is a mistake.
Samsarans don't immediately move on and reincarnate into the next body. Or at least, nothing says it happens immediately.
There is probably time between death and rebirth, though how much is probably left up to players/GM to decide. So you should probably be able to use raise dead on the Samsaran to bring them back to life without any difficulty.
Miracle, can do a lot of things. I would say it would be possible for miracle to restore the soul back to the previous body. But this would also kill the creature the soul moved to, which would be the reason raise dead wouldn't work in the first place. This would certainly be an evil act if performed. I would also argue you would actually need to find the new born samsaran the soul was born into.
And remember, once soul has moved on it no longer remembers it's previous selves completely or clearly. It is a completely new person, that just happens to have the same soul.
Personally, the simplest ruling is simply that when the priest tried to bring him back it worked normally because the soul hadn't moved into a new body yet.
Can you link your urls please?
OK, sorry. Been a long time since I had to do that manually...most forums these days have autolink and editing tools...heh.
Like Claxon said there is no hard and fast rule under the samsaran entry that covers this process. In lieu of a game mechanic it is up to the DM to decide what happens.
If it were me, I would allow a period of time, maybe the length of time for a Raise Dead spell to be effective, before the reincarnation occurs so that a Raise Dead, Ressurection, or similar spell should work.
Again, there is no rule or game mechanic listed for the samsaran that prevents those spells from working just fine.
Good luck!
If Samsarans were genereally unraisable without Wish/Miracle, that would have been expressed explicitly in the rules text. Simply concluding this massive drawback from the fluff-parts is giving to much credence to these.
There is some time between dying and starting the next live. Nowhere is an "immediate" passing on of the soul mentioned.