Village of Warriors
Village of Warriors is Varden with the lid off, and it is the first thing the game shows you for a reason: there is nothing supernatural in it at all. A fortified village has decided it is a kingdom, and the only thing making that true is the number of people still willing to pick up a spear when Razkar says to. The militia at the gate are farmers three weeks into being soldiers. They are not good at it. They are extremely willing.
What makes the village unsettling on the way in is how organised it is about a claim nobody outside recognises. There are ranks. There is a promotion path from recruit to veteran to initiate to Elite Guard, and everyone in it takes that path seriously. By the upper tiers you are fighting people who are genuinely dangerous and who earned their titles inside a system that only exists because one man kept insisting on it.
Encounters
Tier 1
Village Militia Recruit
Tier 2
Village Militia Veteran
Tier 3
Warrior Initiate
Tier 4
Elite Guard
Tier 5
Ravok Bone-breaker-Lam (Mini-Boss)
Tier 6
Berserker Adept
Tier 7
Warrior Champion
Tier 8
Royal Guard Elite
Tier 9
Warlord Lieutenant
Tier 10
King Razkar Rozpruwacz (Final Boss)
The final boss
King Razkar Rozpruwacz holds a crown that no map acknowledges, and he holds it by being personally the strongest reason to obey him. His warlord lieutenants are not a bodyguard so much as an argument he has already won. He fights like a man who has never once been able to delegate the thing he is best at, and he is right not to.
Before you enter
The recommended level is 1. Treat it as a starting point: farm earlier tiers, upgrade gear, and adjust your pet when a boss stops you.
Difficulty inside a dungeon comes from one number that climbs with the tier, and the step between tiers is a large fraction of the gap between dungeons. So a wall at tier 7 here is not a signal to grind this dungeon harder - it usually means the opening tiers of the next dungeon are a better use of the hour, and you come back with the gear they dropped.