During the SDCC 2011 World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo Swag Show panel held by Blizzard Entertainment and its licensed partners, Blizzard license product manager Kat Hunter and Blizzard SVP of Creative Design Chris Metzen revealed a few details of the upcoming Diablo III: Book of Cain.

The publisher of The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King … Insight Editions is collaborating with Blizzard Entertainment to develop this canon product.

Stay tuned to Blizzplanet. I have been in contact with Insight Editions since early July and waited until the SDCC panel for the official roundup of details to surface. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I will request some preview scans. This might take a while because the Book of Cain book will be on sale around the Diablo III launch date.

Transcript

Chris Metzen: 13:04 – “Another really cool project we are working on with a brother named Flint Dille is a source book for the Diablo universe. It’s been many years since we published a Diablo game. There’s a lot of weird stuff floating out there in the internet and wikis and things like that, so we wanted the opportunity to really create a product — it’s essentially Deckard Cain’s journal … I think we are calling it the Book of Cain … where over the course of his adventures, his archaeology, and studying of the manuscripts over the years he’s put together a compendium of what makes the Diablo universe the Diablo universe.”

13:34 – “We are highlighting Heaven and Hell, the people that lives there, the realms of Heaven and Hell, the history of Sanctuary, the lands of Sanctuary, highlighting maybe the classes that have been playable in the games up to this point, notable people in history and pretty much trying to create a fairly tight compendium of all Diablo lore and you know one nice edition. So with any luck, that book will pop around whenever the game comes out and will be a very useful tool in getting back up on what’s up with the Diablo universe. So that’s something we are very very excited about and working on rapidly and intensely right now.

Read about more upcoming licensed products in our SDCC 2011 Blizzard World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo Swag Show Panel Round-Up page.