The Grand Duchy of Nordsville is a gargantuan, genial nation, ruled by Baris Brevik with an even hand, and remarkable for its museums and concert halls, punitive income tax rates, and devotion to social welfare. The compassionate population of 10.01 billion Nordsvilleans are fiercely patriotic and enjoy great social equality; they tend to view other, more capitalist countries as somewhat immoral and corrupt.

The government — a sprawling, bureaucracy-choked, socially-minded morass — juggles the competing demands of Healthcare, Education, and Environment. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Nordsville. The average income tax rate is 79.3%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The Nordsvillean economy, worth 534 trillion kroner a year, is highly specialized and mostly made up of the Book Publishing industry, with significant contributions from Tourism and Information Technology. State-owned companies are reasonably common. Average income is 53,418 kroner, and distributed extremely evenly, with practically no difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Citizens are remarkably well involved in the political process, the nation turns a blind eye to human rights abuses in its quest for athletic supremacy, internet ads promising "hot singles in your area" are even less accurate than they used to be, and proper policy proposals prerequire professional peer-reviewed papers. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a very well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Nordsville's national animal is the moose, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

Nordsville is ranked 89,482^nd in the world and 6^th in Niamark for Most Subsidized Industry, scoring 1,791.12 on the Gilded Widget Scale.