Oh man! Here's another one that is a perfect example of what I'm trying to say in this post:
You enter the chamber with Nettie. There's a dead drow. Now, looking at said dead drow, how long ago would you say that Nettie and Halsin were attacked by said drow "in the woods together with some goblins?"
At first, second and third glance, I'd say maybe a day or two ago at most. The body is pretty well preserved. It's not rotting or decaying too badly. No one complains of the smell.
According to documents you find, Halsin and Nettie encountered the drow over a month before the game begins, like a month and a half before. So that corpse would be REALLY bad off. The smell would be incredible. When you go to the toll house, that corpse in the basement was only there for maybe a week at most, and the characters comment about how terrible it is.
So why did I conclude that Halsin had only been gone for like a day or two? Because there were little things all around indicating that he'd not been really gone that long, like a dead drow that is perfectly preserved on a stone table so that it looks like Halsin and Nettie had been examining his corpse very recently; as if they captured him like yesterday.
So why not add a little blurb during Nettie's dialogue to clear up this little misconception. "This one had the same problem as you. Attacked us in the woods together with some goblins about a month and a half ago. Tadpole crawled out of his head soon after we killed him. We've used some magic and alchemicals to preserve his body for further study. That's why the smell isn't absolute rot and decay."
Boom. Problem solved, and now players have some idea of when the event with the drow happened and why that body hasn't totally rotted out.
