Til Death Do Us Heart is an official Actual Play for Heart: The City Beneath, released as a podcast by the game's publisher Rowan, Rook and Decard.
The players are Nathan Blades, Naomi Clarke, Grant Howitt and Ed Spence. Kieron Gillen is the campaign's gamemaster.
The Heart exists below the elven city of Spire. It's an eldritch thing surrounded by an underworld where reality frays. The Heart wants to make your desires come true, but it'll probably kill you in the process.
The high elf Soil-Clogs-The-Throat (Ed Spence) is a Deadwalker, one of the rare few who died, but couldn't stay dead. He doesn't know why that happened, but he desperately wants to find out. Castor Scrift (Grant Howitt), supposedly Soil's servant, is a shifty Junk Mage who's a little too fond of intoxicants. Their friend Velvet Montecarlo (Nathan Blades) is a Witch with prophetic dreams who just wants to help other people get the things they want.
And then there's Heike the Handless (Naomi Clarke), a Gnoll who was maimed at her own wedding. Now filled with bees, she's still searching for her bride, Louisa, and the hands that Louisa severed and stole.
When Heike receives an invitation to Louisa's new wedding, in the depths of the Heart, the four adventurers go on a perilous journey to attend, and to work out just what the hell is happening.
The first two episodes were released November 5, 2024.
Til Death Do Us Heart provides examples of the following tropes:
- An Arm and a Leg: The gnoll Heike the Handless lost her hands before the start of the story, when her wedding went horribly wrong and her bride Louisa bit them off before fleeing to the Heart. Heike's now inhabited by a swarm of bees, which have built her constantly shifting prosthetic claws of bone and wax. Her introduction acknowledges that they look "fucked up" and comments about hands are often a Berserk Button for her.
- Artificial Limbs:
- Soil-Clogs-The-Throat has lost his lower jaw, which is replaced by a golden prosthetic. He removes it when eating alcoholic jelly.
- Heike the Handless lost both hands when her wedding went horribly wrong. Her bees have built her prosthetic claws of bone and wax, which are continually growing into more complicated forms.
- Assassin Outclassin': Soil-Clogs-The-Throat and his cousin Dance-With-Marigolds have been sending assassins after each other for years, without ever succeeding. Soil considers it "japes, and nothing more" and seems honestly surprised when Dance, seriously offended by his cousin's resurrection as a Deadwalker, sends a very expensive squad of killers into the Heart to finish him off. However, he didn't factor in Velvet and Castor, who make short work of their leader and scare the others off.
- Berserk Button: Heike reacts very badly when anyone mentions her missing hands. Or mentions hands in casual conversation.Soil: All right, hands up, who has died? Obviously-Heike: [interrupting] Oh! Thank you, "hands up", very good, fuck you.
- Brown Note Being: Merely looking at Velvet in her other, monstrous form will harm anyone who sees her.
- Continuity Nod: It's mentioned that some of the guns used in an attack on the protagonists are clearly supplied by Ptolemy Bay, an arms dealer who's one of the main villains of the "Dagger In The Heart" campaign.
- Happy Flashback: The second episode opens with a flashback to Heike's wedding, a moment when her bride's sister seemed to accept her. Before it all went wrong.
- Meaningful Rename: Soil-Clogs-The-Throat adopted his current name after he failed to truly die. It reflects his existence as a Deadwalker, caught in the borderlands between life and death. A flashback to his funeral replaces every mention of his previous name with a Sound-Effect Bleep.
- Sound-Effect Bleep: In episode three's flashback to Soil-Clogs-The-Throat's funeral, his previous name is 'bleeped' out every time the GM mentions it. Kieron Gillen does this vocally, not with a pre-recorded bleep.
- Sunglasses at Night: Derelictus and the Heart are underground, far from any actual sunlight. That doesn't stop the dark elf Castor Scrift from constantly, pointlessly wearing sunglasses.
- Too Many Belts: Soil wears “many interlocking leather belts from which hang bags and satchels and bones", plus "chains upon chains of interlocking golden coins" draped around his legs, jangling as he moves.
- You All Meet in an Inn: The adventure starts in the Black Wyvern tavern, in Derelictus, where Soil, Castor and Velvet have been eating alcoholic jelly for days. And then Heike walks in, distraught, having received an invitation to her missing bride's new wedding...
