UESP Forums

In my extremely leisurely (haven't even started the Main Quest yet) playthrough of Daggerfall, I've spent a huge amount of time in Daggerfall County, doing quests for the Temple of Z'en, Mages Guild, Fighters Guild, occasional merchants, and visiting just about every graveyard, ruins, keep, or dungeon that gets added to my map.

But after a while I've just been finding maps to places I already know about, so I figured it was time to move on. After settling upon Tulune County (because it's so close to my home in Gothway Gardens), I've been doing quests for the Fighters Guild and Mages Guild in the city of Tulune.

The other day I completed a Fighters Guild quest and the head of the Tulune Fighters Guild gave me a map to Castle Magnulion as a bonus, so I decided to check it out without needing to complete a quest there, so I could take my time and explore it fully.

After I explored everywhere I could get to, the only place that remained was a door that was blocked by a statue. This was in the big room with a large set of stairs leading up to a second level, which is a module that appears in many dungeons, including the starter dungeon at the beginning of the game, except some versions of the module (such as the one in the starter dungeon) don't have a statue blocking that door.

I'd encountered the same version of the module (with the statue blocking the door) in at least one other dungeon in Daggerfall County, but hadn't been able to get through the door, so I concluded that maybe the area on the other side of the door wasn't intended to be accessed in that version of the module. I'd encountered things like that in other situations, such as bricked-up doorways that didn't function as portals because in other versions of those modules the dungeon exit was at that location, or brick portals that were covered up by bookcases, etc.

Then I was watching a streamer playing Daggerfall and he encountered the brick portal covered up by a bookcase, and lo and behold he made the bookcase slide out of the way. I knew you could do that with other things-- a cage blocking a door, or a tapestry blocking a brick portal-- but hadn't been able to do that with the bookcase blocking the brick portal or the statue blocking the door. And more importantly, I'd been able to complete my quests in the other dungeons without needing to access the blocked portals or door, which was largely why I eventually decided that maybe those things were blocked off because they weren't needed and weren't meant to be accessed.

Anyway, I never could get the statue to move aside and unblock the door in Castle Magnulion, and I couldn't find anything online about it, so I just called the dungeon done and went back to my home in Gothway Gardens to store the items in my loot that I wanted to keep.

Then I decided to do a quest for the Temple of Z'en in Gothway Gardens and was sent to Vojlodon to destroy a rare religious thingy that was actually a great evil. I knew I'd been to Vojlodon before, and what do you know, that was the place where I'd previously encountered the statue blocking the door. And lo and behold, I spotted a wheel or dial on the wall in a nearby room which slides the statue out of the way! I'd specifically looked around everywhere for anything like that in Castle Magnulion, but apparently I'd missed it because the dial disappears if you aren't facing it at just the right angle, as happens with the switch on the wall of a closet in a different dungeon module.

After exploring all of Vojlodon-- including the area behind the blocked door and another area accessed by portal-- I couldn't find the rare religious thingy anywhere, so I started going through every room again and looking behind every object. (I'd had a similar experience where the quest item ended up being hidden behind a crate in a room that I'd already searched multiple times.) And in the five-sided room which is where the dungeon exit is in the starter dungeon, there were two tapestries side-by-side at the pointy end of the room, which I couldn't look behind. Almost by accident, I clicked on one the tapestries and it rotated slightly. So I clicked the other tapestry, it also rotated slightly, and there was the rare religious thingy! Woohoo! Not just one exciting discovery, but two!

After turning the quest in at the Temple of Z'en, I went back to Castle Magnulion to verify that the dial was there on the wall to move the statue away from the door, and that the section behind the blocked door was just like it was in Vojlodon, including the brick portal that leads to yet another section.

Talk about serendipity. What are the chances that a random quest would send me back to the dungeon where I'd previously seen a statue blocking a door, and that I'd spot the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dial on the wall that slides the statue out of the way, such that I could go back and finish exploring Castle Magnulion?

great story! Sometimes I enjoy the smaller kingdoms because with the limited number of dungeons there is a greater chance of getting repeats, and eventually you learn the place by heart and know where all the quest locations are.