Protip with 1257AD: Pick a faction, that feels close to you, and then just ignore the rest of the world, that is not directly bordering it. Try to roleplay, it's the best mod for that kind of thing that i've found
I picked Zemaici tribe, one of those little Balt factions with 1 castle and 1 village. I pretty much had to solo the one war it got into, against another such tribe, the Pruteni. With all the relatively huge kingdoms around me waging war over towns and castles with armies in the thousands, the tribal conflict was rather funny
But then, the Zemaici king had no family members for me to marry or anything and wouldn't go to war against any other baltic tribes, no matter what i did, so i ended up leaving him and joining Lithuanian kingdom, just to have some action
-edit: You generally get tournaments in your proximity now and then, you can easily raise a fortune that way. Apart from that, you should be upgrading your manor and doing practice fights in the nearest town. There are deserters and bandits all over the place too, you probably just got unlucky with that.
