The finished version of that map from earlier; kinda worried it might look a bit too fantasy-esque, rather than depicting a fictional, but realistic country. Maybe it's the islands, lakes and massifs.
Some facts about the country, according to the history that's been worked out for it in the server of the NS region it's supposed to be a part of:
Size: 729,855 km2
Population: 101,449,845
History: Early European Modern Humans interbreed with Denisovans in a rather
peculiar place - on one hand, it's a subtropical highland region reminiscent of certain valleys in the Andes, where the weather is pleasant all year long and where nature provides enough resources, the locals were able to develop a sedentary lifestyle despite the marginal role of agriculture in their society, as if they were Jomon in Japan, or Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest...
...but on the other hand, the fact that the place is slowly but surely getting squeezed by continental drift against the massive mountain range to the south, let's just say earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are a disturbingly frequent occurrence - do you know why the topography of the region resembles a giant terraced rice paddy? Yeah, that's part continental drift pushing the country up, and part erosion and volcanic ash filling the cracks afterwards.
After spending the Neolithic and the Bronze Age as a fabled land of plenty with Frazerian/Gravesian undertones, the nation falls behind the rest of the world due to its isolation, and is partitioned by two empires - a mostly Greek one, and a mostly Tamil one. Having regained its independence and, eventually, unity (in a very Spain-like manner, that is, through marriage), the polity accepts to become a protectorate of a colonial pseudo-Danish empire in the early modern age, rather than be conquered again.
By the late 20th century, the country becomes fully independent yet again, even as the protectorate was a rather mild one and the nation was mostly self-ruling anyway. Decades of ecological fuckery (turns out, as obscenely fertile as the country was, protectorate-era agriculture and industry had consequences Tolkien would've deemed too dire even for the Scouring of the Shire) have pushed the country to the brink of environmental collapse, but countermeasures have been enacted ever since the 1970s, also due to the local royal dynasty not wanting to rule over ashes of the non-volcanic kind (the royal in question is very liberally based on Carlos Hugo of Bourbon's most galaxy brained moments), and due to the unexpected helping hand of ethnically related political refugees from a nearby country - the fact that they were made political refugees because they turned that nearby country into a Rhodesia of sorts is... a bit of a national embarrassment.
Why the fuck does this atrocity exist: it started as a kind of rationalization of JRPG worlds, of all things - the country's simultaneously fertile and hostile nature a holdover from trying to make up a plausible reason behind the lack of human-to-human wars and the prominent role of adventurers and hunters; if everyone has enough to eat, but their livelihood is always under threat because Mother Nature is a bit of a bipolar serial killer, those young men that'd usually be sent to die in wars would be more needed in other roles, that'd be just as dangerous anyway. Over time, it picked up pseudo-anthropology of the Frazer/Gimbutas/Graves kind - a society as peaceful and vaguely matriarchal as those depicted in their fever dreams could've only endured in a place no conqueror could conquer easily, and it would've become a bit of a hermit kingdom over time anyway, or so I tried to justify that.
Speaking of which... any perennial crops (European/Mediterranean, especially) that could've been turned into a prehistoric superfood by some Neolithic peoples that liked the thought of a full belly, but not so much the thought of back-breaking labour? For now, I've settled on making chestnut flour the basis of the local diet, alongside extant perennials such as asparagus and extinct species such as silphium but, maybe you've got better ideas.
