I've seen a lot of posts about it, but seeing how you do it would be helpful.
Its no mystery. Earth 2, Life 1, Armorer, Might, Hearty (Is it called hearty? The +hp/lvl and immune to poison one), Cruel. Rusty short sword. Cast stoneskin and regen. Look for mites, ruffians, wolves, lone darklings, rock spiderlings, and any goodie huts. As you pick up levels, prioritize adventurer's boon, potential, lethal, trainer, bloodthirsty, brute, finesse in generally that order. Path of the warrior. As you pick up normal armor, you can start killing black widows, plague stalkers, shrills, larger groups of darklings, sand golems, butcher men, etc. Once your atk and def get into the 20's and you have 50 or 60 hps, you're good to go for anything except slags, forest drakes, troll armies, and those sorts of big nasties.
Like I said, it's just about picking your battles. I will do a thread next week.
I think a no city challenge might be fun. I will try this on hard tonight myself. I feel that I would have to get lucky on a lot of things though for this to work.
Honestly, if you play any sort of melee oriented sov, and exercise caution in the early game, you'll be surprised how easy it is. Remember you can shop in your opponent's territory and you can flip their outposts to claim shards they have built on. Not that you even NEED to do that to win, but it's still nice to remember. Not having to worry about your lands/holdings or care what the enemy factions have claimed is really liberating. You just wander the world and kill what you please.
About the only way this gameplay isn't viable is on insane where the monsters just have too many hps, but even then I'm not 100% sure I couldn't pull it off.