I guess first off is you can click manage and set up a home anywhere, but that may be common knowledge. The issue is it still costs 20 silver to expand the land, specifically when I set up a home in the swamp to test it would only give 66 space for 20 silver, 15 minutes and 3.6 effort. Combat is random but its a 10% chance of it happening when you "shift" so if your passing through an entire area the chance is each time the green bar fills, you do however auto-fight when you do get an encounter...not sure what goes into it but it takes 2 minutes to auto fight. The overland combat does increase your land skill wherever you are so training swamp wont be that much of a problem, just time consuming. The lowest terrain is 15 and it goes up to 35 in the mountains to the north so getting good exploration is an almost must. You will most likely come back when gathering and find your character is mutilated which you need to spend time resting it off.
To get to lanfar you need to do a bunch of quests that start in hawkoria after you finish the mushroom cave, first you go to ratkin cave, then serwin tower, then orogoi forest, then the abandoned cabin, then to landel which has 3 dungeons there each with its own monsters. Enemies in the southern areas aren't that tough if you can do landel, roughly 25 offense and a spread of 25,30 and 35 defense.
Now I don't know if you can make a guild place on lanfar, but I suspect you could, the real question becomes how do you do that then...