The Holy Empire of Mardunia is a huge, environmentally stunning nation, renowned for its museums and concert halls, avant-garde cinema, and public floggings. The hard-nosed, cynical, devout population of 255 million Mardunians are ruled without fear or favor by a psychotic dictator, who outlaws just about everything and refers to the populace as "my little playthings."

The enormous, corrupt, moralistic, socially-minded, well-organized government juggles the competing demands of Law & Order, Spirituality, and Education. The average income tax rate is 67.0%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The sizeable but underdeveloped Mardunian economy, worth 8.67 trillion human skulls a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. However, for those in the know, there is a slick, highly efficient, highly specialized black market in Trout Farming, Tourism, and Door-to-door Insurance Sales. The private sector mostly consists of enterprising ten-year-olds selling lemonade on the sidewalk, but the government is looking at stamping this out. Average income is 33,990 human skulls, and distributed extremely evenly, with practically no difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Sniffer dogs are trained to follow clouds of fruity-smelling vapor, male celebrity chefs are laughed at for their lack of manliness, cinemas play art-house movies to ever-shrinking audiences as film critics rule the industry, and the single fish caught by Mardunian fishers last year is cited as evidence of Mardunia's thriving fisheries. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to the all-pervasive police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Mardunia's national animal is the sun, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

Mardunia is ranked 33,967^th in the world and 577^th in the South Pacific for Most Patriotic, with 35.87 flags saluted per person per day.