[Gaunt]

Thinlomien,

Having thought more about it since my original post that that you quoted, here is my complete theory (at present) on the setup of this game.

When the game began, there were two werewolves, working in collaboration to decide who to kill. They chose Kitanna, then Nogrod, then Rune.

On the third night, Manwe and Melkor were introduced. Now, I can only imagine Brinniel and Legate did not know they were to become these characters from the beginning, and were only told on the third night - both characters would be needed for the idea to work, and if they had been told from the beginning then one or both of them could have been lynched or killed by wolves, and it would have caused problems.

Now, as to the problem of why there would be two characters placed there only to kill each other off, i think it may be that Manwe was to act as wolf, and it was Melkor's job to track him down. This, I guess, would have become more obvious if Manwe had actually had the chance to make a wolf-kill - but through good fortune he was voted off before he did.

Hence, through chance, both of these characters were gone almost as soon as they came on the scene, leaving us with only the original two wolves.

However, as I write this some ideas have sprung to mind: perhaps, had the vote not taken out Manwe, both of these characters would have behaved like wolves, but wolves who were trying to find one other wolf - a game within a game with each of their unsuccessful guesses taking out villagers as collateral damage. I did ask myself: how would they be able to distinguish between the other wolves and their opponent? But the answer to this ties in with what I have already said: they would be looking for someone who had become a wolf on the third night, like themselves, so they would be looking for a change in behaviour from that point. In fact, this seems more plausible than the Manwe as wolf and Melkor out to track him down theory.

In answer to your question as to why Nogrod and Rune were killed: Nogrod had targeted Gollum, and generally seemed to be onto what now appears to be the type of game the werewolves are playing. As for Rune, I will have to study his posts more, but my general impression was that he was quite prominent in the posts and must have come up with some insights that were troubling the wolves.