Hmmm, so they do. But...the official name of that set is “Earth Ghost Dragon”. The dragon is undead, and I always assumed that the warriors in the elementals sets were too, raised as servants by the dragon. Even if they’re living Vorgans who just happen to have glowing, ghostly weapons and shields, the set can hardly be held to depict an ordinary relationship between dragon and man(-beast).
...Of course, the Plasma line would later establish that there are definitely living dragons (such as Tailtorn) who ally with the Vorgans. So there’s that.
Still, I stand by my theory regarding the aesthetic reasons behind the nogards’ existence.
This set includes two Vorgans, a Krystal for them to covet or possess, and a small wall to provide scenery (but no actual protection). It does not include anyone for the Vorgans to attack, despite the set’s name. However, none of that will be the focus of this review. What you and I care about is the inclusion of the second entirely new dragon mold reviewed on this blog! Well, sort of. The Vorgans’ monstrous companion is not exactly a dragon…
While the Draigar and Norvagen bring actual dragons into battle alongside them (whether these are equal allies or slaves to the humans is unclear at this point in history, though later canon establishes the former as the norm), the Vorgans fight alongside creatures which, though possessed of wings and fiery breath, do not seem to be dragons at all. Descriptions of sets refer to these animals as “beasts” or “monsters”. The Fire and Ice movie charmingly calls them “nogards”. I have encountered no reason to believe that this term exists outside of the movie’s canon, but it certainly seems appropriate to call the Vorgans’ monstrous companions “dragon” backwards, as they are essentially bizarre parodies of dragonkind (in the best possible way).
Much as a Vorgan resembles a nonhumanoid monster contorted into a humanoid form, a nogard looks like an utterly undraconic being contorted into the form of a modern fantasy dragon. It has four legs, a tail, a pair of membranous wings, and lots of pointy teeth, so it should look like a dragon, right? Yet somehow it doesn’t—not even slightly. It is not sinuous and serpentine like a dragon, but squat and compact, even round. Its lumpy head looks like what someone who has never seen a reptile would call “reptilian”. It has two kinds of dentition: tusks that might be compared to an elephant’s or boar’s and blunt, almost human teeth spaced so closely together that they could almost be mistaken for a fused ridge of bone—neither remotely similar to a dragon’s lovely varanid teeth. Its limbs are not remotely reptilian, and its feet and hands almost look simian with their swollen joints; they are tipped with rounded hooves, not draconic talons. Its stiff, stubby tail is the precise opposite of a dragon’s ophidian one, and is tipped with a concave pincer rather than a dragon’s convex tail-spade. Its wings, while membranous, resemble no wing that has ever existed on Earth or in draconic art—with their shrunken size and rectangular shape, it is difficult to believe they actually allow flight. To top it off, the nogard is covered not in scales but in leathery skin, with the exception of a row of bony plates across its head—dull and rugose, unlike a classic dragon’s gleaming armor—and a mane of plainly mammalian hair.
In short, the nogard, despite being modeled after a dragon, could not possibly be less dragon-like, and I am quite convinced that this was entirely deliberate. It is to a dragon what a Vorgan is to a human. Whether a product of convergent evolution or magical manipulation, the nogard couldn’t fulfill its role better. As usual, the Mega Bloks Dragons creature designers get it exactly right.
In another sense, I suppose the Vorgans sort of demand an entirely invented creature to fight by their side in place of dragons. The Norvagen and Draigar are based, however loosely, on real-life human cultures (the Vikings and a mixture of England and the Far East, respectively). Therefore, they ally with dragons, which are based, however loosely, on entities from those cultures’ real-life mythology. But orcs have no place in any real-life mythology. They originated with Tolkien and have been mutated by fantasy gaming into something entirely new and different. Because of that, it would feel jarring somehow to have dragons be an integral part of their culture, so instead, they have the nogards, who are just as new and artificial as they are. The Vorgan shield depicts a nogard skull rather than a dragon face as all the humans’ shields do. Wherever the Vorgans come from, there are surely no dragons there, nor anything else that would be familiar to us. That place operates by different rules than the lands humans inhabit.
This nogard’s name is Rot. With his coloration, he even sort of looks like a rotting corpse. Like all nogards, he wears leather bands around his wrists. Are these manacles to restrain him, or jewelry as worn by many of the dragons? My guess would be the latter, given that they are not attached to anything else.
I’ve realized that I should really be including the names of the warriors who appear in these sets. So these guys are, from left to right, Balkhangal, Larggar, and Volumog.
The Vorgans are, as you can see, orcs. Everything else about them follows directly from that premise: they are large, green, monstrous, and prone to raiding human communities, wielding Stone Age weapons, building oddly advanced yet still somehow “primitive”-looking contraptions, and slouching. Some sort of wall is included in the set alongside them.
Somewhat distressingly, none of them appear to be wearing any kind of lower body covering.
Their helmets are decorated with what appear to be actual horns taken from the corpses of animals, and unlike the helmets of the other peoples, these feature no face-obscuring visors. The Vorgans are the only faction that is consistently treated as villainous, yet because they are also the only ones to reveal their faces to the audience, they come across as oddly more sympathetic. We can see each Vorgan’s individual face (and the Mega Bloks designers, ever attentive to detail, have made sure that they are all unique) and appreciate him as an individual; we can only appreciate the humans’ uniquely designed helmets. Admittedly, as Orc-Sympathizer-In-Chief, I am biased.
I said him just now, and I’m quite sure that the set designers intended all the Vorgans to be male, but now that I think about it, there’s no particular reason why that should have to be the case. I doubt Vorgans have human-like sexual dimorphism or a human-like conception of gender. These orcs could belong to any gender. Heck, they could all be female and reproduce by parthenogenesis! Who knows? The reader of this blog may find that the amount of distress they experience in reaction to the Vorgans’ lack of lower body coverings either increases or decreases when they contemplate this hypothesis.
