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YouAreTheDemons

How do the skull keys work?

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I think the Doom Voxel Project guys made their job harder than it had to be by assuming the skull keys are 3D. They could just be flat, mundane, skull-shaped keys, which magically stand up on end and blink just like the key cards do. As for how skull keys can open regular tech doors, we already know that Hell and Earth have a complicated relationship. Even though they've unfriended each other on Facebook, Hell borrows Earth tech to breed its monsters and Earth wears its hellish corruptions with pride. They really get along just fine.

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The skull keys are probably supposed to be simply painted skulls with magical unlocking properties.

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BaronOfStuff said:

Should be? No, else we'll end up with the same style of stupid shit explanations that the Doom movie had. Like they're not really demons or monsters but a person's true form, or whatever fucking cack was pulled out of nowhere. I can't remember, I was bored shitless by that point.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with some magical/supernatural workings as far as Skullkeys go. Fuck it, as far as I'm concerned Doomguy pulls a He-Man and shouts "BY THE POWER OF <colour> SKULL!!" (unfortunately it's too long a sound for the engine to handle), there's a flash (that the Doom renderer wasn't capable of displaying), and BAM! The door unlocks.


I think magic in science fiction is retarded. There's nothing supernatural-looking in Doom that can't be naturalistically explained except the demons, and even THEY can be explained naturalistically.

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Doominer991 contradicted:
There's nothing supernatural-looking in Doom that can't be naturalistically explained except the demons, and even THEY can be explained naturalistically.


Uh, what the FUCK?
I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that a key feature of a demon is its magical power.

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Doominer991 said:

I think magic in science fiction is retarded.

Never play Shadowrun.

You should also avoid reading Doom 2 manual.

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I can't really explain this, but I know one thing: the keys are a suppository. It's the only thing that makes any sense around here.

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Doominer991 said:

I think magic in science fiction is retarded. There's nothing supernatural-looking in Doom that can't be naturalistically explained except the demons, and even THEY can be explained naturalistically.

Give me one "naturalistical" explanation for the arch-vile's resurrection and pyrokinesis, the cyberdemon's infinite rockets, the revenant's muscle-less movements (and infinite projectiles), the fireballs of the imps and cacodemons, the plasma of the barons and knights, the pain elementals and lost souls, the various powerups such as soulsphere, megasphere, invisibility sphere, and invulnerability sphere, the corpse sky in the third part, the sky floors, the icon of sin and its spawning cubes.

It's simply impossible to come up with something that isn't completely bullshit.

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The clash and mingling of science and the occult is one of the best themes of Doom, of course there's magic. The rules of physics as we know it don't necessarily apply to the Hell dimension, it's science fiction after all.

If the pentagrams, black candles and the Arch Vile's mock-crucifixion pose don't scream black magic (let alone all the other cheesy 90's satanic imagery) then I don't know what to say.

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Gez said:

Give me one "naturalistical" explanation for the arch-vile's resurrection and pyrokinesis, the cyberdemon's infinite rockets, the revenant's muscle-less movements (and infinite projectiles), the fireballs of the imps and cacodemons, the plasma of the barons and knights, the pain elementals and lost souls, the various powerups such as soulsphere, megasphere, invisibility sphere, and invulnerability sphere, the corpse sky in the third part, the sky floors, the icon of sin and its spawning cubes.

It's simply impossible to come up with something that isn't completely bullshit.


The Arch-Vile reverses time (hence why a part of the monster's death frame is displayed), and it's compacting the air below your feet, causing it to explode from the pressure, the flames are from the heat and pressure of the compacted air.

The Cyberdemon's rocket launcher teleports in rockets from inside those big stone pillars around the Tower Of Babel.

Maybe that "combat gear" the manual talks about the Revenant being wired up with includes electric servos on the joints, and something to keep all the bones together, and maybe those explosive projectiles are PRODUCED by the Revenant's guns.

The Imps have structures they've evolved that allows them to coalesce a burning ball of plasma. The Cacodemon doesn't create fireballs, it's creating ball lightning from a biological Tesla coil-like device in it's mouth (which is protected from electricity by a coating of "biological rubber")

Basically a more evolved, non-burning version of the Imps plasma balls.

The Pain Elementals are females and Lost Souls are basically how they reproduce, for more information on this theory, you should visit http://www.doom2.net/single/soul.html

Basically it's a sphere full of goo made of a "synthetic booster enzyme" that repairs your body.
Same as before except it includes a fluid that hardens to protect your body (kind of like liquid armor).
It coats your body in a luminoreactive fluid which bends light around your body.
It creates a force field that, when viewing things from inside of it, make everything appear black and white.

The "sky" isn't a sky, it's a ceiling above the mountains made of flesh, possibly from the Icon Of Sin.
The floor is covered in hologram emitters the emit a hologram of the sky.

I think of the Icon Of Sin as a super organism composed of other massive creatures, the entity that is killed at the end of Doom 2 is just the part of it that's currently dominant, and the spawn cubes are just that: cubes with a teleporter in them that teleports in a creature from somewhere else.

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Doominer991 said:

The Arch-Vile reverses time

That's magic.

It is impossible without magic.

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There is no point in talking about things that the doom engine only partially implemented. Then you have to notice that some objects rotate on the floor.

I prefer the demon story used by a series of novels where "demon" was slang for "extra-dimensional traveler". All the special powers were due to devices that could be bought at the bazaar (if you had the money).

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The skull stares down doors until they are intimated and open up on their own.


Also Hell.

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Gez said:

That's magic.

It is impossible without magic.

Everything is possible in "science" fiction. But don't you dare calling it magic. What are you, a fantasy fan?

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The keycards work like IOprox cards. The skulls work upon the same principle by assimilating UAC tech due to hell. Or due to some magical hierarchical hell principle when they went about interior decorating the place.

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Seeing skull key doors generally had the skull color graphics next to them, I kind of imagined one of them was a hole the skull fit into.

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I always imagined that these skull keys are just a regular keys with the "skull" being a color differentiation. Hence why they are named "skull keys" and not "skull keycards" or "skull emitters"

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I still don't consider skull keys magic. Even in stories, magic has a cost, otherwise spell casters would become worshipped like gods. You wouldn't use magic nilly-willy when the job can be done mundanely. So I'd rather think the skull keys are some form of robust mechanism, not some long-term spell that might dissipate when it feels like it.

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They're like Pac-Man's power pills, and Doom Guy eats the door. Only Doom's graphics aren't advanced enough to show this, so they appear to open. Also, the technology in 1993 couldn't make him say "yum, this is one tasty door" so it just sounds like it opens.

We could really throw any suggestions around as to how these things work.

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printz said:

I still don't consider skull keys magic. Even in stories, magic has a cost, otherwise spell casters would become worshipped like gods. You wouldn't use magic nilly-willy when the job can be done mundanely. So I'd rather think the skull keys are some form of robust mechanism, not some long-term spell that might dissipate when it feels like it.


It depends on the type of stories. In the tabletop RPG hobby, they're generally classified into high, medium, or low fantasy, with the power, cost and availability of magic scaled accordingly. Compare for example the use of magic in most D&D stories vs. what you find in Conan and other pulp-style fantasy. In the first case, magic is typically everywhere and only the the most powerful spells present any difficulty or have any real, lasting cost. But in the second case, even a simple spell can require long rituals, sacrifice, and leave the caster drained of energy (and over time takes its toll on his body and mind...)

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Eris Falling said:

magic


I'm thinking this. It would be fitting for the Hell thematics.

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Heh, the "magic" post wasn't even serious. I didn't bother thinking it through because it was in blogs originally :P

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Linedef magic. Like any good magic trick it relies on smoke and mirrors, neither of which could be implemented satisfactorily in the vanilla engine, so you have use your imagination to fill in the gaps.

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GreyGhost said:

Linedef magic.

Frankly it all makes sense now. John Romero magic! Oremor nhoj…

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Eris Falling said:

Heh, the "magic" post wasn't even serious. I didn't bother thinking it through because it was in blogs originally :P


It seems like no one likes it when people post in the blogs.

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