is there an object or perhaps some techniques for generating random numbers within a specific range?

You could use [random] with an argument of whatever range you wanted, then add/multiply/subtract etc to get the range you wanted.

I don't really know any other way.

you could use [scale ] (not the gem one - if you have gem switched on then then it will not create the right one btw - name conflict)

then feed [random x] to the scale object and set the range to whatever you like. See the help file. Setting [random 1000] as opposed to [random 100] will give you finer resolution.