Mostly blind to the machinations of the supernatural, humans make up the majority of the population in La Luna. While most of them go about their days ignorant, there are some groups that have learned the truth about the world hiding behind the veil.
First are the mighty hunters, the beacons of light against the supernatural. Having existed nearly as long as supernaturals have been known to man, they fight to keep humans safe from the things that go bump in the night. Most hunters are human, though rarely other supernaturals may take up the cause. While The Order is the largest presence in the Hunter world, so far, they have no presence in La Luna.
More information on Hunters can be found here.
Second are the psychics. Psychics are rumored to be descendants of a cursed clan of divination witches from long ago, giving them similar foresight abilities and the ability to see through the veil. However, human psychics are just that. Humans. They do not have a familiar so they cannot call upon or touch magic in the way witches can. They are at most observers over the realm of magic, receiving visions from whims not their own.
Third is the unlucky. The supernatural world cannot always remain hidden. There are countless victims to a vampires need to feed, a werewolf's uncontrollable shifts, or a witch's careless magic. Once the veil has been ripped away, the unlucky have to learn to live a new world where acknowledging what they've seen could mean death.
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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.
Here’s the second War Chest and our first taste of the Mega Bloks Dragons designers’ really incredible ability to provide a sense of cultural difference and depth through visuals alone.  Really, looking at these characters, you could never doubt that they came from a completely different culture from the Draigar of the previous set, and that both peoples had long histories and rich traditions.
Anyway, these guys are the Norvagen (i.e. “norse vikings”), described as seafaring marauders from the north.  Their armor is a lovely blue-green color (how they get it that way is a mystery to me) and their helmets are decorated with antlers.  Their masks have rather animalistic quality, perhaps intended to frighten enemies, unlike the mostly functionalist visors of the Draigar.  Also unlike the Draigar, who wield axes and clubs primarily and seem never to have invented the sword, the Norvagen carry sabers into battle, as well as great wooden shields displaying a dragon with a closed mouth.  In addition to the warriors and their weapons, the set includes a canoe (essential equipment for seafaring raiders) and a wooden wall with a wide window.
Like the 2002 line, Krystal Wars included for each of its human factions a small “War Chest” set featuring three warriors, some weapons for them to wield, and a bit of architecture to set the scene.  I will begin with the Chest for the faction with which we are already familiar from the 2002 line: the Draigar.  The box art for 9866 Draigar War Chest depicts the warriors charging toward the audience, brandishing their weapons, unlike the original War Chests, which showed their minifigures lined up in a row and unarmed.
The Draigar of the Krystal Wars period resemble those of the 2002 line in most respects.  They have the same body and head molds found in the 2002 line, and their armor is still bronze.  Their helmets’ ornamentation, however, is now silver in color.  Does that have any implications about a possible dominance of Valtheran culture in the Draigar society?  Probably not.  However, there’s something else that might: the Draigar dragon insignia seems to be identical to the Valtheran dragon insignia.  I don’t think I’ve mentioned that before on this blog.
The architecture of the Draigar is unchanged from the old days in form but greatly changed in another aspect: color! Â While the standard Valtheran outward-jutting parapets remain gray, the walls of the castle are bright vermillion and the omnipresent Warfang-Valtheran draconic figure is plated with bronze. Â I am going to assume that Padraig, after establishing peace and unifying the two peoples, poured money into public works to make the cities of the Draigar more glorious than ever before.
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9896 Dragons Tower (and observations on Draigar architecture)
Man, this set was a pain to find.  I’d forgotten its name, so I kept Googling phrases like “draigar castle” and “draigar fortress” and uncovering only 9890 Warriors Fortress and various Draigar fortresses from later years.  It’s called Dragons Tower? That’s not a tower!  That’s, like, two towers, minimum!
Anyway, yes, Dragons Tower.  Some sources give its name as “Dragon’s Tower” or “Dragon Tower” (including the Mega Bloks website), but the box says “Dragons Tower” without an apostrophe, so that’s what we’re going to call it.  I assume that the dragons of Dragons Tower are the carved stone dragon heads that line the battlements.  Or maybe it was built at a spot where many dragons died—or maybe it was built by dragons, though I doubt it.
9896 Dragons Tower was a limited edition set, exclusive to Toys R Us and packaged in a box that at least appeared to be made of molded metal.  It features fourteen Draigar warriors along with a single-headed dragon, gold of scale, black of wing, and red of claw, spine, and tooth.  As can be seen in the lower leftmost image, the names of the warriors and dragon are listed on the interior of the packaging.  Unfortunately, I can’t find a higher resolution image of that part of the packaging, so I have no idea what those names are (and I’m not going to buy a set that would cost me at least $65 just so I can see the characters’ names—not immediately, anyway).  If any of you own this set, please message me with a high-resolution photograph of that part of the packaging, or at least a list of the names printed thereon.
The Dragons Tower seems to be a pretty standard example of Warfang-Valtheran (or early Draigar) architecture.  It features a dragon’s-head gate of molded gold, a typical blocky structure, and Valtheran-style protruding battlements.  Before the tower stands a symbolic “gate” of the kind seen in 9881 Battle Gate.  Does this indicate that the early Draigar did indeed have the architectural know-how to create such gates?  Or was this gate present long before the construction of the Dragons Tower—or were they both present long before the Warfang-Valtheran war?  Who knows?  Here’s my headcanon: the symbolic “gates” are ancient sacred sites, dating back to the time before the war, when dragons and humans coexisted peacefully on Terraurgen.  They were constructed by the dragons themselves, or else by humans working in conjunction with dragons.  The original Dragons Tower was constructed during this time as well, though not as long ago as the gate in front of it was constructed.  It fell into ruin long ago, but when the war ended, Padraig commanded that a new Dragons Tower be built in the same location, to serve as his fortress and the center of the new Draigar nation’s capital.
Here’s something I just noticed about Warfang-Valtheran/Draigar architecture:  There is a reoccurring jagged “stair-steps” motif.
Actually, this doesn’t seem to exist in 9886 Sorcerer’s Lair, which either indicates that Draigar architecture is much more influenced by Valtheran architecture than by Warfang (which may in turn imply that the Valtheran had more power than the Warfang in the newly formed Draigar nation...or might just imply that the Valtheran had more experience building large structures), or lends support to the “Sorcerer’s Lair is a very old structure that was built by neither the Warfang nor the Valtheran, but some ancestral culture” theory.
Hey, I came back to this blog!  Here we have the official guide to the human characters of the Warfang-Valtheran arc, conveniently included on the last page of each 2002 set’s instruction manual.
9890 Warriors Fortress includes the Warfang warriors Kriwarg, Harg, Vorlang, Simmurg, Malkin, and Morlack, and the Valtheran warriors Rythiel, Leith, Aprash, Ashul, Ramach, and Imrien.  9886 Sorcerer’s Lair includes the Warfang warriors Woljag, Akrif, Grosag, and Somyrk, and the Warfang wizard Vorlod; as well as the Valtheran warriors Gilnor, Tamoth, Ethyn, Shaldor, and Hulraith.  9881 Battle Gate contains the Warfang warriors Skolack, Wulluck, Kurg, and Morkusk, as well as the Valtheran wizard Yulmar, and the Valtheran warriors Harnash, Riel, and Durian.
It is implied that Morlack and Rythiel are the leaders of their respective factions, as each is shown wearing a unique cape in some other images. Â Vorlod is located closer to Morlack than Yulmar is to Rythiel, which I take as a shaky confirmation of my theory that the Warfang have greater respect for wizards than do the Valtheran.
At the center of the image is Padraig, who wears golden armor and is not associated with either faction.
The Warfang names definitely share a unique “flavor” among them, as do the Valtheran names, and these two “flavors” are different enough that it makes me wonder if the Warfang and Valtheran speak different languages and are not closely related at all.  But then I remember that essentially all of these names are plausible English names.  I wonder if the difference between Warfang and Valtheran names is primarily a difference of dialect (i.e. certain sounds are more common in the Warfang dialect than the Valtheran and vice versa) or of naming convention (i.e. certain words are more popular as name elements in Warfang names than Valtheran names and vice versa).
