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You are reminding me of a childhood where I toted around Blizzard game manuals in my school backpack so I could read them on the tram and show them off to friends. I also played through D1 recently after maybe 15+ years or so, and found the writing and atmosphere holds up superbly even without all the extra worldbuilding from the printed pages.
When people say D1/D2 are better written than the following sequels, there's often some pushback that wants to eagerly point out how little story and dialogue were in those first two games. To which I say "Yes, and how did Blizzard manage to fuck that up so much".
Are you me? I got yelled at so much in my middle school geometry class for reading the WarCraft II manual instead of paying attention. There were some absolute gems among manuals back then. Blizzard had some of the best, but Interplay and Westwood tried too. I got this Encyclopedia Frobozzica with Return to Zork, had me howling with laughter despite not having played any of the games before. The diary that came with Zork Nemesis that may have been from a version of your character that time travelled into the past and got killed seeded the plot well too.
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