Er... Veniarus may actually end up as third level pending the end of this little 1 shot that Perrin has me on, depending on the XP rewards.
Should have responded to this earlier. Apologies.
The APL for the adventure is 5. For me, that involves recruiting characters in the 4-6 range, 1 level below or above the APL.
While technically Veniarus could enter a party at level 3 if he had a level 7 character to balance him (say, if [MENTION=88649]perrinmiller[/MENTION] decides to us DMC to level Cythera again), I've found that a level disparity of more than 2 makes it extremely difficult to have encounters that work for everyone. Either the high level characters are wiping the floor with everyone without breaking a sweat, and / or the low level characters are hiding in the corner / getting their behinds handed to them.
I don't think that's fun to play, and I know it wouldn't be fun for me to run. I still find the crunch of running games taxing; the added complexity of having to try to adjust a bunch of encounters (either ahead of time or on the fly) makes the whole thing too frustrating for me, I'm afraid.
Mind you, as long as it's taking to have a party available, Veniarus may be level 4 or higher by then, so the whole discussion becomes moot.