So, after completing The Gathering Storm and a few other adventures before and after it, it finally sunk in that all my poor henchmen who have spent their turns moving from range to close and then getting slaughtered by my waiting players could all have been using Guarded Position after their maneuver to buy a little bit more defense.

And then they can get slaughtered by the players.

So, any other basic NPC tactics you've found that help get a little bit more life out of your players' enemies?

(And any thoughts on how to protect the leader/wizard/clearly-not-a-henchman guy?)

Hi,

OK, unless your monsters are there to be slaughtered (gobbos, skavenslaves, etc) they dont stop at close range. They spend a wound or A/C/E and charge right into combat and get a hit in first. Not only does this give the threat of immediate pain to your players, it also starts pinning them in combats before they get the opportunity to strategically arrange the situation to suit them (remember disengage is a maneuver, so to then engage someone else is an additional maneuver=fatigue).

Your "leader" NPC is always prone to archer types. So pin them first or remove line of sight. Give him/her some bodyguards. Lastly if he/she is not melee focussed be really vicious with their support cards. Nasty wizards should be really scary, empowering minions and draining pc life forces, and my personal favourite is demons using chaos incarnate. Put a little cunning into it and most self respecting demons are giving all enemies in medium range 2 misfortune to all tests, ideally before the inevitable fear/terror test. This doesnt kill players but it does add up with fatigue, stress, crits, disease and environmental misfortune dice to give them the feeling of everything falling apart. Which IMHO is how WFRP should be...

Hope that helped