So my group might end up playing an Ascended campaign... as the title ensues.

Thus far we've come up with some outlines for some PCs, one of us wants to be a duelist Vindicare assassin and now that I mentioned it to him as a joke he wants him to be Deadpool. We also have a Psyker who has the jedi mind trick going. And since I'm kinda tired of always playing the leader of the group I've considered making a Daemonhost that's basically Hellboy.

Why you may ask? Because it would be kinda fun to see how our GM deals with these three and the undoubted trouble/ damage they cause.

So what do you guys think? We typically don't run the super "grim dark" setting for 40k games.

For a duelist he is probably much better off with Desperado, especially if the ****** really wants to play Deadpool.... (Not really insulting your friend personally since I don't know him, but I LOATHE players who insist on importing Deadpool and Wolverine into EVERY effing game system!)

Vindicare in addition to being broken as hell ("I dodge Exterminatus! "...14 times per turn.) has absolutely NO social or political value for their group whatsover. The sad thing is other than the epic-failure that is the "Temple Assassin" dodge rule it is actually a fairly decent representation of the TT Vindicare. Calidus would have been much better suited for Ascension IMO. Since the Vindicare is useless in social action (the bulk of Ascension games) it is unfair to allow a player to make one and then NOT give them a nasty fight once in a while to show off... The problem being a "moderate challenge" to a Vindicare is sudden doom for most of the others on the team.

Hope you have a very radical Inquisitor or the Daemonhost idea is going to last about 5 seconds. Lots of luck to ya'! If you DO have a fairly radical Inquisitor but the GM shoots down the Daemonhost concept (likely!) there are still some options in the Radical's Handbook that should fit the overall concept fairly well, you just may not be as far along in the process of giving up your festering bag of meat and water to the Warp just yet....

Alternately, you guys might LOVE Black Crusade! You get to play unrepentant BAD guys and the XP system is VERY freeform. It still has rules, but they are much more "flexable" as to what you can buy. Just be prepared for the consequences if your selection of one too many artistic skill pisses off Khorne and Slaneesh doesn't have your back.... Or Tzeentch has your.... backs?

Hey, its the GM of the Ascension campaign here and I wanna specify a few things before my buddy gets too much negative postings about the idea.

When the group brought up the idea, I sorta took it as a chance to reimagine the setting a little. Currently I've been working on creating a sort of Paranormal Defense Bureau within a hive city that, under a quite radical inquisitor, works to fight the darker elements within the city through knowledge and research on the subjects of the forbidden(forgive me if this is a little hard to understand as I have a funny way of describing things).

Exhibit A is the daemonhost, who we worked out to really be a version of Hellboy. Unlike most denizens of the warp he's not quite completely evil and is actually an exception to the rule. I haven't worked out a backstory yet as to why but I'm thinking he may either be some sort of sleeper agent for chaos or just a daemon that wants to learn more about humanity(probably farfetched but as some have said on these forums, the 40k setting is vast with nigh limitless possibilities). That said like my friend said I'm not all grim and dark as some other GMs.

As for the Vindicare, I'm gonna give it a chance and if it seems too unbalancing I'll politely ask him to retire the character.

Hope this clears things up.

Depending on what books you have in your collection a few ideas come to mind. If they help they are all yours! If not, no worries.

Radical's Handbook p.66 "Daemon Vessel" elite advance:

"A daemon vessel is a human within whom a daemon has nested a portion of it's being and power...."

This saves you the trouble of having to cook up an entire advancement tree for a "Daemonhost career" since you can just slap this on top of just about any existing career.

Should the Vindicare not end up working out but the desire to include a very powerful killing-machine in the group is still there perhaps substitute a tactical specialist Astartes character with the "Kill Marine" package from Rites of Battle, then equip with Astartes Scout armour, Stalker Boltgun, Stalker bolt ammo, cameleoline cloak and a modest selection of other gear. All the killing power of a Vindicare, but still able to attend social functions and carry on in public reasonably well as long as they are not from one of the "All mortals are weak and worthy of nothing but scorn, contempt and stoic silence" chapters.

One idea that occured to me recently is a possible fix for the Temple Assassin trait: Delete everything but the flavour text and pretend that Temple Assassins have a "force field" with a 50 rating and no overload to represent their uncanny ability to dodge all sorts of "certain doom". They would of course retain whatever reactions they bring with them, but none of the "bonus pile o' dodges" that make them so broken in the Ascention book. This gives them a few (presumably very high %) "oh HELL no!" dodges per turn (spending their reactions to dodge the stuff they really don't want to eat.) and then a virtually infinate number of 50% avoidance chance for any other attacks. This is comparable (in fact somewhat better thanks to dodge/Step Aside/Wall of Steel) with the 4+ invulnerable save from TT. The rest of the class is actually a fairly decent representation of Vindicare Temple assassins, so they probably won't be game-breaking with this tweak.