Cormyr
Cormyr is one of the major kingdoms in the Eastern Heartlands region of the Forgotten Realms, making it one of the areas that Ed Greenwood most fleshed out as this is where he and his players ran their original games of Dungeons & Dragons before he decided to quit GMing and become a splatbook and novel writer.
On the surface, Cormyr is your typical shining happy idealized pseudo-Medieval kingly realm. And depending on the edition, that may actually be true. When it was first conceived, however, Cormyr's big "hook" as a nation was that it was so happy and prosperous because it was basically a fantasy police state, where the court wizard (who isn't Elminster tier powerful, but still up there) runs the royal wizardly academy as a secret police backed with copious amounts of mind-reading spells in order to control the often treacherous and scheming nobles, all to prop up a royal dynasty where the king is infamous for fucking his way through the nobility, the commoners and literally any woman of any race who will express even a slightest interest in his high-Charisma ass.
Like, seriously, this is just a random highlight of traits about how Cormyr operates from /tg/:
- ”war wizards” are literally secret police who run around mind-probing everybody from commoners to nobles to double check for loyalty on the regular
- you aren’t even allowed to have a non-war wizard mage advisor as a noble
- you’d definitely better not be wearing any sort of mind shielding ring, because that is very suspicious, you don’t have anything to hide, do you?
- any spellcasters above level something like 4 have to register with the war wizards on entering Cormyr, so the war wizards know where you are, what you’re doing, by the way you are “encouraged” (read: required) to join the war wizards if you are staying in Cormyr longer than a month
- the Purple Dragons (the standing army under exclusive control of the monarch) are in fact the police force
- highknights exist, as personal agents of the Crown who operate undercover to ferret out plots against the throne, they’re scattered all through the nation
- most citizens will snitch on you to the local war wizards or purple dragons if they hear you saying anything untoward or disloyal to the Obarskyrs
- Cormyr is also the only nation who operates border control crossings on everybody coming and going, while patrolling non-highways
- declares adventurers illegal unless they register with the Crown and are granted a Royal Charter permitting them to operate in Cormyr