The Borderlands of Tristaea is a huge, safe nation, remarkable for its smutty television, daily referendums, and punitive income tax rates. The compassionate, democratic, devout population of 553 million Tristaeans are fiercely patriotic and enjoy great social equality; they tend to view other, more capitalist countries as somewhat immoral and corrupt.

The enormous government juggles the competing demands of Administration, Education, and Welfare. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Seppelta. The average income tax rate is 74.4%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The very strong Tristaean economy, worth 34.3 trillion opals a year, is quite specialized and dominated by the Information Technology industry, with significant contributions from Tourism, Retail, and Trout Farming. State-owned companies are reasonably common. Average income is 61,956 opals, and distributed extremely evenly, with practically no difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

The government's religious works are headed by a New Age guru, they unpaved paradise and tore up a parking lot (ooh, bop bop bop), kindergarten teachers with ankle-bracelets are closely supervised by their parole officers, and a blood-red mark on the doorframe means a building must be passed over for destruction. Crime is totally unknown, thanks to a well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Tristaea's national animal is the moth, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

Tristaea is ranked 74,056^th in the world and 78^th in Horizon for Most Developed, scoring 69.15 on the Human Development Index.