So I am going to one shot Horror of Hugeldal for a group of friends. I have a total of five players and I am planning on pre-generating the PC's for the group.

What I am wondering about is power level for the group in order to make the game difficult but not a TPK. I have 5 PC's so far, each with 13 XP which puts them all into the beginning of their 2nd career. The humans are a bit further along than the dwarf and the halfing. The human X-soldier turned veteran, is a real beast as his career transition cost him nothing and he is 2 advances into his current career. The dwarf and the halfing have just their career bonuses with no additional advances.

The Group consists of
Dwarven Smuggler turned Burgher
Halfling Scout turned Mercenary
Human Soldier turned Veteran
Human Wizards Apprentice turned Acolyte (I’m thinking Amethyst because I loved the setup that Reckless Dice used)
Human Minstrel I’ve yet to level up

I've listened to Reckless Dice Podcast Live session on Horror of Hugeldal and have been trying to judge my PC's strength vs. the RDP groups’ strength. From what I can tell it sounded like both the dwarves and the amethyst wizard were getting ready to transition to their second career; while Helga had just started her second career. Now that was 4 PC's at probably about 12-13 XP who almost got a TPK.

The Group I'm putting together is a party of 5 of each 13XP. Is this enough XP make for a good difficult game?

Any thoughts would be appreciated

Thanks!

-kadyx
 

Sounds like a good balance to me.

I've run about two dozen sessions of WFRP 3rd Ed and I can say from experience that the difficulty of a session/adventure depends mostly on the GM's use of his resources. Want to make the session more difficult? Then give you NPCs/baddies a bigger A/C/E budget and/or more action cards. Make use of terrain and weather (heavy rain, rough roads/paths), adding black dice to PCs dice pools whenever you can. Many of the published adventures (Horror of Hugeldal included) forget to make use of these sorts of things, or at least forget to recommend them. 

Also, make some NPCs difficult to get information from…most Imperial citizens are pretty mistrusting of strangers, even other humans from neighboring towns. If you weren't born and raised within 10-20 miles (a day or more of travel by foot and mount), you're considered an outsider. Not to mention elves and magic using folks being seen as scoming traight from the pit of hell to most commoners. Dwarves are viewed with slightly more respect if not uneasy awe (being so ancient and powerful), while halflings are second class citizens to most people, and thieves and liers to the rest. Use this sort of intolerance to make investigations difficult for the group. Bribes and lying to get what they need should never be out of the question…hence the lack of an alignment system in the Warhammer Fantasy world…too many shades of grey and folks doing whatever is necessary to survive.

Hope this helps.