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A couple of days ago, I gave my critique about The Tomb of Dragons, the latest Chronicles of Osreiath story (i.e. the stories based in the Goblin Emperor universe). In addition to the technical issues/writing issues I noted, I also had two bits of worldbuilding that threw me. There's a lot that is very interesting, but there's also some things that ... I think she would have done differently if she'd had a better grasp on how real-world societies handled similar things.
First is Imperial gift-giving. We see from TGE that the elite of the Ethuveraz regularly give the Emperor lavish gifts. And in Tomb of Dragons, we see that all those gifts then go into these huge vaults filled with generations of lavish gifts because the Emperor can't possibly use them all and it would be rude to give them away. And that is absolutely not how elite, lavish gift-giving works. In, like, any society in history I am aware of. When there is a custom of giving extravagant, very valuable gifts, the point is pretty much never that the recipient will keep and use all the gifts that they get. The point is for everyone to see how generous the giver is ... and it is expected that the recipient will re-gift things! Especially when there is a power imbalance. In those societies, people are expected to give their leader gifts ... and then their leader proves that he's a good leader (and not stingy) by giving those things away in various forms. Hosting parties that use them! Redistributing them to the nobles/elite to reinforce who is worthy of the leader's notice and what good care he takes of them! Using them to fund social programs like taking care of widows and orphans! Gifts, in that situation, are about building and maintaining relationships ... and the relationship between "gift" and "tax" is often slippery. For a practical real-world example, consider Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in the 18th Century. She got given an exquisite lace dress by the city of Ghent (remember that all lace was hand-made at that time and it was extremely expensive). Ghent did this in the hopes that she would let them off the hook for their enormous back taxes (which she did). She kept the dress just long enough to be painted in it, and then she had the dress taken apart and gave pieces of lace out to the court ladies as gifts. When you have people giving their ruler gifts in the quantity and expense that we see described in both TGE and in that vault scene ... they don't expect the ruler is going to hoard them all, and they certainly don't expect them to go into a vault and never see the light of day again. They expect the ruler to use and regift them. (Of course, you could do an interesting take on "the Emperor is supposed to be giving stuff away, and the Varedeise dynasty choosing not to do that is and has caused political problems.")
The other thing was the rural prelate we see at the very end. Who lives all alone in a big house and doesn't seem to have any servants (he does his own cooking, for example) and his parishioners occasionally give him, like, pickles or jam or whatever. And it's fairly obviously based on the "rural clergyman" you see all over the place in 18th and 19th Century English stories (both in itself and also when you consider just how heavily the Amalo books are drawing on Victorian/steampunk vibes). Except most stories don't focus on the practical aspects of how their households ran, so when KA tries to talk about how this guy's household is running, she's making it up and it. doesn't fit.
The first thing you have to understand is just how ubiquitous servants were. Something like 1/3 of all women in England and the US in the 19th Century spent at least a few years as a servant. It was very common for someone to be a servant when young, and have servants later in life. And not because they had gotten rich! Unless you were a highly skilled servant working for a rich person, servants got paid very little cash. The majority of their pay was in room and board, and then they got a little bit of cash on top of that. Pretty much everything took a huge fucking amount of labor, and labor was relatively cheap. So one common pattern was that when you were a teenager you'd go work for a neighbor and they'd pay you in food and clothes and a little bit of money which you would either send to your parents or save up for the day when you got married and started a household. If you did manage to marry (which a lot of people didn't) there was a decent chance you would be prosperous enough to have a few of your neighbors' kids work for you as servants (at least in good years) and also at least some of your kids would very likely spend 5-10 years as a servant working for someone else in bad years. Or (if you were a woman) maybe you'd do someone else's cleaning and cooking to make extra cash for the family. Point is, lots of people had servants. So this prelate would definitely have at least had a maid of all work.
The second thing you have to understand is how rural clergy in most of Europe were funded. And of course it changed over time and was different in different places but broadly speaking it was land + tithes. That is, the church would own farmland in each parish, which the priest of that parish would have the use of. Usually the priest was not doing the farming himself, he was paying someone to farm it for him. This is actually one of the motivators for the Roman Catholic church requiring clergy to be celibate, which happened in the 11th Century: when clergy have their own children, it is natural that they want their children to inherit the land that has provided the family's income, instead of whoever is appointed to the parish after their death. If priests are not allowed to marry (and bastards are not allowed to become priests), then they can't try and pass the land down to their sons, and it stays in church hands. In addition to the produce of the farm attached to the church, there were also tithes--effectively, a tax on the income/produce of the parishioners. Whether that was paid in kind (one bushel of grain for every ten you harvest goes to the priest) or in cash (10% of your income goes to the priest) varied. And of course some of that would get passed up the chain to get used by the larger institution ... but a lot of it would stay and be the priest's income. How much it all added up to varied depending on the size and wealth of the parish. Small parishes in impoverished areas might be "just enough for one person to live comfortably on (i.e. with a couple of servants to do the heavy lifting)" and large parishes in prosperous areas were usually "wealthy enough to rub elbows with the local bigwigs."
