Usually, though, the characters and such act as a clue to people's roles.

For example, say Artsapat was running... I don't know, a pirate-themed Mafia, where most of us are pirates, and we're trying to figure out who gave us up to the British Navy. He could write, "A gruff man with a red hat and a hook for a hand says, "I will not stand for this! We must find the traitor and throw him to the crocodiles!"

And from that, we would be able to figure out that someone was Captain Hook, which might be good for the town, or it might be good for the scum.

Especially if other details made me suspect that Peter Pan was sneaking around in hiding.

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In another game I ran, everyone was a comic-book character, and their abilities were related to their alignment and powers. For example, everyone was a Marvel character, except for Lex Luthor, who was on his own team and was just trying to survive until the last day. Or there was the Thing, who was impervious to being night-killed.

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Sometimes it becomes more like a game of Clue- Isaac ran a Wheel of Time-themed game that had a lot of flavor text involving people's clothes and accents. That ended up giving us clues to piece together who was doing what on certain nights (like, say, if someone was told 'Last night you were almost killed, but your Warder saved your life. You saw a green-robed man sprinting off into the shadows.'