Assuming D&D 5e rules, this is easily countered by casting Gentle Repose on the corpse every 10 days, or any other method of preventing natural decay.

True Resurrection can only create a new body if the original no longer exists.

For example, what if the person casting the spell had a hair sample, or a severed finger or some other item from the monarch’s body,

RAW and RAI that wouldn’t work, otherwise you could cast Inflict Wounds on someone by merely having a strand of hair from them. The RAW answer would be to have someone cast Contingency + Gentle Repose, though at that point you may as well add in a teleport or something instead

I guess this comes down to DM fiat as for what constitutes “touching” the creature. For example, what if the person casting the spell had a hair sample, or a severed finger or some other item from the monarch’s body, which they were also taking any of those steps to prevent decay of?

The 3rd Edition version of the spell is even more ambiguous. RAW, it doesn’t prevent you from “unambiguously identifying” the creature through a means other than touching the body even if the body still exists.

There definitely should be some spells that work like that tbh, it’s a classical trope of curse magic.

The king is a puppet of a dictatorial deity. The solution is to overthrow god.

Once those items are removed from the body they become a separate object. Maybe useful in divination, but not touching the body. If this were true the party could just cut off some hair hand it to the cleric and all their touch spells would be infinite range.

Okay, so, thought experiment. Someone gets cut into a lot of pieces. What do you have to touch to resurrect them? The largest piece? Any piece? No piece, the body is destroyed? What constitutes ‘destroyed’? If getting cut into pieces counts, then how much of the body has to be missing?

RAW doesn’t really adequately address this situation.

My comment was about the plan for gentle repose, but if you’re talking about the resurrection spell it does have text that overcomes this problem, because it regenerates any lost limbs.

Sure, but… which piece gets regenerated? The one you touch?

In that case, why couldn’t the spell be cast on the severed finger to regenerate an entire body attached to it?

It can. My problem was using gentle repose on a severed finger. Looking back it seems like that might not be what you were suggesting. If so my mistake.

Ah, sorry, I think there’s two different competing discussions happening in this same thread. I’m also getting confused about what’s being discussed.

I was proposing (for example) embalming a finger to prevent decay and having a permanent True Resurrection ‘target’, not using Gentle Repose specifically, but I can see where the ambiguity came from.

This really gets into the foundational expectations of the setting.

In a reality structured to allow for Heroes, a leader must be one, or else be replaced by the next one to stroll through.

I thought this was going to be spam. I recommend saying what you’re posting a link to. Or at least something that makes it clear you’re replying to a specific comment instead of posting that at random.

I responded to his comment about the Birthright setting with a video on the Birthright setting. I suppose I could have been more clear, but I definitely did respond to someone and did not post at random.

Funny thing, there was a 2e setting called Birthright, which pretty much made the game about developing land as a lord, rather than dungeon delving

I know. It’s just that I only know because I clicked the link.