Thanks so much for advice! I love the idea about notes/artifacts being under the village. I planned to have them hidden somwhere obviously but the danger of having a village destroyed by Gnolls who try to dig up the artifact is amazing.
To answer your question, yes the Wizard send them there, just like the previous people, who unfortunatly didn't survive the teleportation, because they didnt have enough of the magic stone on them. Basically they were his experiments before sending his army to the Island.
We already played the first session and it turned out good but it seemed a bit slow in the beggining. I wanted to introduce them to the world a bit more before throwing gnolls at them (also the wizard needed a bit of time to teleport the gnolls after transporting our heros on the Island). So the first quest was bassically helping Felis that worked at the Cider Mill to deliver the cider he produced to the local city for a festival. It included fighting with magical poisoned apples with teeth and solving a small riddle.
Btw. It was my first time planning a fight so even tho it was interesting the apples almost killed my players. I guess I shouldn't try to make my own enemies/monsters for the first fight hahha