Consider limiting the PCs to E6. The warhammer World is at its best when the heroes are knee deep in the mud.
Warhammer Fantasy is a gritty, low fantasy setting. There is a risk to all use of magic, and magic items are rare. Disease is a high risk. Social interaction rolls play a big role in most campaigns.
The setting itself should be easy to use, but converting the mechanics would be a lot of work. Good luck!
^This. Getting the fluff is easy, but adjusting the mechanics of Pathfinder d20 to simulate the brutality of Warhammer Fantasy would be a tough task. Just getting the players into the right mindset would be tough to do in Pathfinder d20. In WFRP, experienced players understand that their characters are normally on the low end of the totem pole and a horrible death could be one unfortunate roll away. In Pathfinder players tend to come in with the expectation that their characters will succeed at just about anything thrown at them.
Could converting Warhammer Fantasy to Pathfinder d20 be done? Yes it can. If you just want to bring over a bit of flavor and tone the magic down a notch it wouldn't be too hard. If you want to go full on Grim Dark however, both the GM and the players are going have to bend over backwards to try and fit a square peg into a round hole.
Pathfinder orcs work really well with their ferocity mechanic as WFRP flavor orcs. Pathfinder has ratfolk and jabberwockies. Goblins, ogres, and trolls are no problem.
There is a moderate sized pantheon with magical war priests and traditions of arcane sorcery. The mechanics are very different but the basic organizations and concepts are there.
The insanity and corrupting nature of Chaos is a little tough to convert mechanicaly but does fine as mostly flavor.
Only allow humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings as races.
Perhaps eliminate a bunch of class options for flavor reasons as I don't remember any magical bards, monks, paladins, or magical rangers from the CRB in WFRB but they could work if you want them to.
Remember Elves are Awesome is a full trope in that setting...they are better at everything. Humans in particular can't master more then a single school of magic, unless they are corrupted by Chaos. Only elves among the PC races can do so.
Humans, however, have more kids and are lucky. They can also learn in five years what takes an elf a few decades.
Elves vs Dwarves is also a huge trope, due to the Dark Elves inciting a race war between them.
But yeah, E6 is the best way to play it. magic is horribly powerful in the WFRPG...bypasses all armor and toughness, straight to wounds. Ugh.
==Aelryinth
Offhand, I think getting rid of the full 9-spell-level magic-using classes would help, though that might lead to strange things like most wizards being summoners or bards with the magician archetype, or magi. That way, even if you want to run the game to higher levels than in E6 or E8, reincarnate only comes in around level 10, I think, and raise dead around level 13, if you feel like using the playtest classes from the Advanced Class Guide.
Thinking back a few editions, to represent the ebb and flow of magic, maybe have all spellcasters use an effective caster level of (normal caster level) – 3 + 1d6, rolled for each spell cast. At low levels, maybe rolling poorly means the duration is halved, or the spell fails outright.
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I'm going to respectfully disagree with the E6/E8 suggestions. You can certainly go that route but I don't think that should be your primary focus. Here's what I would suggest.
Rule #1: You're converting a world/setting. You are NOT converting a rules-system. Presumably, you've picked Pathfinder as the system for a reason and the more you try to transform it the less time you'll be spending on playing up the aspects of the setting that (presumably) enticed you to consider this.
Rule #2: Dark Fantasy, not Low Fantasy. Warhammer is a pretty high-magic world but it's dark. By most measurable criteria, Evil (Chaos) is winning. There are two aspects you need to keep in mind to slant the game towards Dark Fantasy: 1-Dangers lurk everywhere, there are very few idyllic forest glens, there are many dark, haunted woods. 2-Choices are NEVER black-and-white. Choices should always have a consequence and usually should be choices that have to be made where somebody in the game world loses. The heroes saved the village but that farmer and his family were slaughtered by orcs. You stopped the cultists' ritual but half the city burned down, etc.
Rule #3: Status matters. A primary tenet of the Warhammer setting is that social status matters. This is largely reflected in Warhammer's career system where you have to "pay your dues" to advance to the more prestigious careers. You need to have some kind of social status mechanism. For example, the Midgard Campaign setting has such a mechanic and while your Charisma stat can influence it, it's not the sole (or even primary) driver.
Rule #4: Factions, agendas, and conspiracies. Everyone, even the PCs, should be tied to a faction, religion, organization, philosophy - something. And it should be pretty common that those elements of the world will be at odds with each other on occasion. This church doesn't like that church. This soldier doesn't like people from that country. Nobles scheme. Cultists plot.
Rule #5: Magic is dangerous & powerful PCs will be the primary exception to this rule, especially in a system like Pathfinder where so many classes are spellcasting ones. So you'll need to reflect this in the world around them -- most NPCs aren't spellcasters, outside of arcane orders and churches, there really aren't "magic shops" as they exist in some Pathfinder campaigns. Oh, and see Rule #4 - those orders and churches really don't care if you have the coin. You better have the coin AND be willing to do something on that group's behalf if you want to purchase any magical assistance from them.
Rule #6: Magic is feared Yes, the PCs probably have access to more magic than most groups in a given area. Guess what? They're viewed with suspicion and fear as a result. Even allies will be wary about the person who can charm them or blast a group of cavalry with a spell. And if a spellcaster becomes a threat, don't expect local authorities to pull any punches. Spellcasters are a threat and they're going to react accordingly.
Rule #7: Make choices; say "no" when appropriate: This isn't the cantina scene from Star Wars. "No, Fred, I'm sorry, you can't be an Oread undead-blooded sorcerer. Why? Because you'll be viewed as a monster and a freak by every settlement in the the world and attacked on sight. Since this is a campaign involving intrigue in a city, that won't work."
As for specific Pathfinder-adaptation suggestions:
1. Use the low-magic treasure rules. Wealth should be harder to come by to help drive the grubby/gritty side of the Warhammer experience.
2. Use the slow XP progression. Warhammer characters don't typically go from Ratcatcher to Noble quickly. Since in a level-based game like Pathfinder, character level directly translates to character ability/power, you need to slow things down.
3. Standard point-buy should be the highest used. Not Heroic, certainly not anything higher.
4. Setting integration over character-optimization. You can play an elf in the center of a human city but the player better be willing to accept the buy-in that the elf will be viewed as a rarity. No, you can't be a Chaos Knight and openly walk the streets. If you want to be a half-orc, you best stick to the borderlands or wilderness or expect knights, soldiers, guardsmen, etc. to try to kill you. If they're successful, they'll suffer no legal ramifications. (Obviously, there are exceptions to this suggestion, but they need to be just that - rare exceptions that are well-integrated into the game. They shouldn't just be hand-waived away because someone will say "you're limiting my fun".)
5. Forget about CR...mostly You want to make PCs feel like life is cheap and dangerous? Stop worrying about whether encounters are perfectly balanced. Now, I'm not saying ignore CR altogether. What I'm saying is don't adhere to the conventional wisdom of "this many below-APL encounters, this many at-APL encounters, this many above-APL encounters". A mob of commoners or goblins? Throw as many as required to make them a substantial threat. The adventure is a ghost story? Worry less about whether the PCs have a magic weapon and more about what relics they need or actions that they need to complete to banish the spirit or put it to rest. And don't be afraid to lean towards the higher-end of the CR/encounter scale - you want to bloody their noses more often than not.
You can also add house-rules or 3rd-party supplements to further reinforce the "threat" of the world: spell-failure tables, etc. I definitely recommend things that amp-up the threat of combat like the Critical Hit Deck or Torn Asunder but those should be added to provide the final tweaks to the setting. Modifying the mechanics should be seasoning, not the meal. The setting is the main course.
I would tend to agree that WFRP is not "clearly" low magic. It just appears that way in the Empire and other human lands, since it is so maligned and feared.
Even the dwarves mastered rune magic which plays pretty powerfully into divine casting I would say.
Anyone who has read any of the novels with Gotrek and Felix can see that powerful magic, yet rare, certainly exists. Unfortunately for PC's, it is mostly deployed by evil chaos worshippers. The notable exception would the college of wizardry in Altdorf.
An awesome AP though to say the least.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with the E6/E8 suggestions. You can certainly go that route but I don't think that should be your primary focus. Here's what I would suggest.
Rule #1: You're converting a world/setting. You are NOT converting a rules-system. Presumably, you've picked Pathfinder as the system for a reason and the more you try to transform it the less time you'll be spending on playing up the aspects of the setting that (presumably) enticed you to consider this.
I would agree with this as a big thing. Focus on including pathfinder things that match cool parts of the setting (orcs, goblins, undead, ratfolk, dwarven troll-slayer/barbarians, chaos cults) and generally avoid bringing in things that do not gel well (half Xs, monks, etc.) but don't sweat the latter part too much.
Not specifically a WHFG conversion, but of Pathfinder RPG and dark fantasy, I find it strange that almost every thread discussing using Pathfinder with dark fantasy calls for E6 or E8 as the solution. I completely disagree. Rite Publishing Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) while having some spells nerfed or nonfunctional altogether (less than a dozen), all other PF rules are left intact. Yet Kaidan is still a very gritty, low fantasy world where the "heroes" can have small victories, but for the most part the Kaidan setting is "unsaveable". There is no chance for the PCs to win in an attempt to bring the downfall of the settings evil overlords. Like Ravenloft, the evil is in the land itself, and no amount of spellcasting or heroic actions is going to change that.
Only if I were adapting a low magic setting, like Conan's Hyborian Age, would E6/E8 provide a viable solution. Dark fantasy (including that of WHFG) is not low magic, rather it is dark fantasy. While dark fantasy settings can be low magic in power, this is not an automatic assumption.
Spellcasters in Kaidan can fully use most of their 9th level spells in playing the game, but doesn't guarantee any kind of "win" in the overall storyline.