I had yet another radiant Companion's quest to rescue a kidnapping victim. This one was in Eye of Mara Pond, or whatever it's called. Tiny island with a trapdoor leading down to a cave with vampires. I was supposed to rescue Eltrys. Hm, I thought, that name sounds familiar...

All I had to do was kill two vamps and the quest updated: "Talk to Eltrys." Okay, where is he? At the bottom of a ramp was a partially submerged cage with a body floating inside. Guess who? Yep, and then I remembered: he was murdered by the Markarth guards in the Temple of Talos during the Forsworn Conspiracy. Nice. He's long dead, yet is kidnapped by vampires and hauled halfway across Skyrim for me to rescue.

Fortunately I'm on a PC and can manually advance the quest to completion, but I can see how our console playing friends will eventually have a clogged journal. Very frustrating.

Yep, I have a College of Winterhold radiant quest to get a book which is already in my inventory and the quest marker takes me to an empty chest. I'm hoping there's a future patch that deals with quest dependencies.

That's actually pretty funny. You would think they would have coded it so that dead NPCs would be excluded...

Maybe the vampires stole his dead body, and that the family members of his wants his body to be taken back for proper burial?

man op u bout got me fired for my sudden burst of laughter. Thats some funny [censored] and even more funny because ot dosent surprise me in this game lol

Is it too much to ask that radiant quests exclude NPCs that are ties to scripted quests?

Sometimes? The radiant system is nothing that was promised.

Radiant System can be such a problem when comes down to this sort of stuff.. This is why I prefer to do Radiant Quests that Spawns a brand new item/NPC/creature to take care of instead of using a current NPC/item/creature that I've prolly encountered already.

It gets worse with the the mental lapses Farkas and Vilkas have about dragons. Almost every time I take them to the alleged site of a dragon it's not there.

You gotta wait for the Dragon to respawn. Once it does, you can go back and kill it.

Unless it isn't there because it is out hunting then wait for it come back. (Yes, some dragons from Den does go out hunting sometimes. I've seen this before because I was 'prey' at one point in time to one them that was like 5 minutes walk away from its den)

Not sure if this is part of the radiant system or not but recently I did the thieves guild quest where I had to meet up with Maven to talk abouthttp://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Dampened_Spirits. Long story short. I had finished the civil war saga some time ago by siding with the stormcloaks. After the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Battle_for_Whiterun_%28Stormcloaks%29 both Commander Caius and Balgruuf the Greater was exiled from whiterun and wand up staying in solitude. Right after I finish what Sabjorn told me to do I report back to him to see none other than Commander Caius himself acting as if he was still in charge of whiterun, and how he actually arrested Sabjorn.

I'd think the excluding scripted deaths would be the best way to go about it.