Much of the early installment weirdness (Taako's idiocy, Merle's indecisiveness regarding which god he was actually a cleric of, Davenport's (and to a lesser extent, Barry Bluejeans's) verbal tick of repeating their names) can be explained by the fact that the characters had lost more than a century's worth of memories prior to the start of the story. The fact that it works so well retrospectively is even wilder when you consider that no one, not even Griffin, knew about the events of The Stolen Century at that point.
Lucretia, despite having a lot of gravitas in her delivery most of the time, is very chummy with the party, willing to engage with their jokes and saying things that don't fit her apparent age. This is foreshadowing that she's both younger than she looks, and knew the party before their adventures in the podcast started.
The Hunger has likely existed far before our heroes ever heard of it. So how many other worlds did it end up devouring before they were made aware of it? And it's entirely likely that their home world got eaten as well.
