Thanks for that . About the most reasonable and informative reply.
It's not completely true though.
While some of the player-housing near Meduli (and housing in general) is used in the way described:
1) Most of them are not actually online at any given moment,
2) a lot of them are actually not even dedicated RPKers at all.
3) KoTo has a strong presence around Meduli, so, if anywhere has 'safe' PvE hinterlands, it's Meduli.
In my experience, as far as nearby regions, Fab/Tindrem is much worse for RPKs, for example. If you're not going to bother doing anything in the outskirts of Meduli for fear of RPKs, you may as well just uninstall the game, because, frankly, most other places are far worse. In the grand scheme, the outskirts of Meduli (5min ride radius of Meduli) is a relatively safe area.
You can easily make 20~g in about 10-15mins doing what I described, and doing this will easily outweigh the risk of losing a horse. While building up wealth, don't bring out Desert horses. Just get cheap low level steppe horses. Start bringing out Desert horses to level once you have a solid nest of wealth, and can afford to lose a low level desert horse that you bought for, preferably, <10g.
Just make sure you go out without any valuables; just your (non-desert) horse/horse-bag, some cheap armor (if even), bandages, & a bow/sword/weapon of choice of relatively low value. This is probably sub 10g of items(including horse, less if you go tame one yourself)... So, one successful venture pays for two losses. If you're vigilant, it's very hard not to come out ahead with this method. Probably you can make over, or at least close to hundred gold within an evening pretty easily.
The hardest part of setting up is to get the position of various local spawns imparted in your natural sense of direction so you can quickly run a circuit between them all. Start by picking a few of them in a row with the map application, and riding out to them so you can get a feel for where they actually are in the game world. Before long, you'll be able to run a circuit, maybe even in a couple directions, and come back with 15-20g of butcher mats/carcass every time.
Source: I was in the same position some months ago, and I had success doing this. It's not going to make you rich quick like some guild farming methods, but it works.