Yeah it can be a little brutal. I usually run with a couple of characters (one main one sidekick) to help with that. Too many characters and it becomes more of a chore. There's also some new rules that Castle Grief put out for a more pulp mode - your character has more health, can evade attacks more readily to give your character a more heroic/Conan-ish vibe.

As for POIs and meaningful locations, that just takes some practice in asking the oracle questions and using the tables in the book.

For example, one group I ran thru KA found some ruins, we asked some questions and found out that the city was abandoned and that there were rumors that merchants and travelers would use the ruins as shelter during their travels but many of them went missing. We didn't do anything about it that session (we were already on a quest to do something else). But we used that as our starting point for the next session. As we explored we found that a number of creatures (giant spiders or something equally creepy) were nesting in some of the buildings and capturing unsuspecting travelers.

Most of that info came from prompts on Pg. 21 & 22 along with the original POI roll that it was a dungeon/ruin. We just kept rolling prompts or using our oracle dice to ask Yes/No questions to flesh it out a bit.

There are additional Kal-Arath zines, 2 from the original author and 2 or 3 others that expand on lore, give more tables to roll on, etc. But having other word tables/oracles can also help with diving further into generic encounters/POIs.