Twenty years after 'Diablo II (2000)', Deckard Cain and his niece Leah travel to Tristram where a falling star causes Cain to disappear. The Nephalem (a Barbarian, a Witch Doctor, a Wizard, a Monk or a Demon Hunter) sets out to rescue him.
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Head to Thousand Needles in World of Warcraft and you can stumble into a Star Wars-style pod racing event in the Shimmering Flats. One of the racers is Diablo himself, and he does not look thrilled about being stuck in a go-kart instead of terrorizing Sanctuary.
When Diablo II's patch 1.13 dropped in 2009, fans noticed two mercenary names had quietly changed in the game files, from Weohstan and Erfor to Klar and Tryneus. Blizzard never explained why, and since it happened right as Diablo III was in development, plenty of fans still think it was some kind of quiet lore setup.
After surviving the fall of Tristram and spending years helping heroes across two whole games, Cain finally dies in Diablo III, fatally wounded by the witch Maghda and her Dark Coven while protecting the fallen star that turns out to be Tyrael.
Composer Matt Uelmen wrote Diablo's Tristram theme on a 12-string guitar, and it became so recognizable that when Blizzard wanted to announce Diablo III at BlizzCon 2008, all they did was have a guitarist strum the opening chords onstage. Apparently over ten thousand people in the crowd knew exactly what game was coming before a single word was said.
The Sin War trilogy isn't set anywhere near the events of the games. It rewinds the clock 3,000 years before the fall of Tristram and follows a farmer named Uldyssian as he gets tangled up in the ancient war between angels and demons over Sanctuary.
Long before he became a fan-favorite archangel, Tyrael crash-landed on Sanctuary as what looked like a falling star. It was the discovery of his shattered sword El'druin at the impact site that eventually led humanity to uncover the existence of the Nephalem.
All seven of the Great Evils, including Diablo himself, were originally born from the seven heads of a single primordial dragon named Tathamet. Three of those heads became the Prime Evils, and the other four became the so-called Lesser Evils.
