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When I play Arena, I try to visit every city in every province to do the ruler's quest for the XP gain.

I've encountered a few cities where the palace is inaccessible due to buildings that block the palace gates. Unless I missed a city in them, it seems that every city in Hammerfell, Skyrim, Valenwood, Elsweyr, Summurset Isle, and High Rock has an accessible palace. Apparently only Black Marsh and (if I remember correctly) Morrowind have any cities with inaccessible palaces.

I'm still questing through Black Marsh, but so far only one city has an inaccessible palace. I'll add to the list as I continue through Black Marsh and then move on to Morrowind.

- Glenbridge, Black Marsh
- Rockpark, Black Marsh

Edit: 2021-05-16, added Rockpark

Edit: 2021-05-29 -- I finished visiting every city in Morrowind a few days ago, and all of them had palaces which were accessible, so apoarently only Black Marsh has any cities with inaccessible palaces. I'm almost tempted to make a joke about Argonian architects, but I can't think of any good ones!

Yes, this is a known issue with those two towns. Rockpark's inaccessible palace is actually the butt of a joke in Daggerfall.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Glenbridge
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Rockpark

Huh, I had tried to use Passwall in towns before, but couldn't. I never thought of trying to "prepare" the spell inside a building and then actually "using" it outside. There is at least one house design that has inaccessible doors due to the hedges around parts of the house, so if I can get Passwall to work this way maybe I'll finally be able to access the interiors of those houses!

I tried the Passwall trick on the houses with hedges blocking the doors, and discovered two interesting facts:

(1) Passwall doesn't work on hedges, so you must use it on the parts of the building which are visible and tunnel your way to the doors, then you'll be able to enter the houses.

(2) When you exit through the door*, you'll be inside of a solid block and won't be able to move in any direction. I didn't think to try using the world map to fast travel somewhere, but if that works then it might be the only way to avoid having to load a saved game and losing any unsaved progress.

I didn't try using this trick to access the otherwise-inaccessible palaces, but presumably it would present the same issue of being stuck inside a solid block when you exit the palace.

* Addendum for clarity: "after exploring the interior of the house." There's nothing special about the interiors, so the only reason to use this trick to get inside would be to see which of the eight(?) possible configurations is used for the house.