While it felt faintly ridiculous for Thrundarr to assign a giant rat as the first quest, I now find myself exploring the Tomb of the High Kings and the Rift before I meet one of the rare monsters that he assigns in p10. The problem vis-a-vis gameplay is that characters are likely to reach levels 18-20 before completing the quest, and quests 2 through 5 are far too easy for such characters.

In earlier versions, I would try to complete all Thrundarr's quests when in the early teens, while the forest, the dwarven halls, and the ogre cave are a real challenge. There is also the interesting tradeoff for rapidly advancing characters of whether to get them done before clearing the pyramid.

I think it would be fine to restore the previous behavior; one of the benefits of Thrundarr assigning a common monster is that you can get his quest rewards earlier. Alternatively:

• Have Thrundarr assign a monster with danger level vaguely appropriate for the character's level, but not a rare monster.
• Have Thrundarr assign a rare monster, but introduce code to force generation of the monster in a reasonable time. For example, if the quest is active, then each time a monster is generated of the right DL, it has a 10% chance to be the quest monster.
• Keep the current behavior (p10), but change the order of the quests and/or rewards. For example, why not assign the AF/DH and ogre cave quests before the random monster? The dwarves need news, after all, more than they need a dead master swordsman. :-)