Ok. Tried to give this more thought.
To be clear, this is NOT what I'm suggesting:
"Hi. Welcome to the Emerald Grove. Man! No one in years and then suddenly tieflings show up on the tenth of Elient. Then our first druid, Halsin, took off on us with that adventurer on the second of Marpenoth. Now it's the 20th of Uktar, and they just got back without Halsin. Sigh."
What I am suggesting:
A few additional comments during a few different main NPC dialogues just to clear things up. So, maybe while talking to Zevlor, when he mentions the gnoll attack on the road he says something like, "about two months ago" just to give players a basic idea that the tieflings have been in the Grove for about 2 months. It wasn't yesterday, a year ago, six months. Just a quick additional comment added to let us know roughly when.
Then, everyone's dialogues need to be consistent. So if Zevlor says two months, Pandirna shouldn't make it seem like she was attacked by gnolls yesterday and that's why her nerves are shot.
And if Pandirna was referring to the goblin attack as to why her nerves were shot, then I should have seen her on the wall helping to fight the goblins off. If she was referring to a separate goblin attack that had occurred earlier, then a simple addition to her dialogue to clarify that is all it would take.
So, something like, "my nerves were shot after the raid that occurred a few days ago when we captured that female goblin."
Boom. Simple dialogue addition clears up what attack she's referring to that has her all frazzled and when they captured Sazza, both at the same time.
I shouldn't have to find a plethora of tomes and scrolls in order to determine some sort of very basic time frame for when things occurred and what is the objective of various different individuals. Simple additions to dialogue are all that's needed to let players know what happened when and who is after what.
