RPGs that used paragraph books and other external text

[Acrux]

As far as I know, Temple of Apshai was the first computer RPG that used a paper manual to provide additional text about what was happening on-screen - in this case, descriptions of the room your character traveled through. Later, Interplay started using paragraph books to make role-playing descriptions or decisions in several of their games - Wasteland, Lord of the Rings vol. 1, Dragon Wars, etc. Ultima had the runic alphabet as well as very detailed descriptions in the manual of the history of Britannia.

For a lot of these games, the prevailing wisdom is that the use of external text was to save disk space and copy protection. So, it's not really needed anymore. But it feels like we lost something that brought us a little closer to the games, a bit of real-life simulationism that's now replaced with NPC dialogue, in-game narration, or sometimes nothing!

Anyway, what are your favorite examples of this?

► Show Spoiler

There's a remaster of the Apshai trilogy on Steam!

[Rand]

The Ultima books were just amazing.
The layout, the font, the drawings... all were excellent and you could tell the company really cared to make them great.

Even the paper used for the pages and the heavier, lightly textured cover were a delight to touch.
(The texture you see below is real. You can feel it all.)

And they appear to be acid free. My Ultima V books look the same as the day I opened the box in 1988.

[rusty_shackleford]

The books would often have fake passages to trip up people trying to spoil the story by reading ahead, feel like @Tweed probably knows the best ones

[Tweed]

The books would often have fake passages to trip up people trying to spoil the story by reading ahead, feel like @Tweed probably knows the best ones

Wasteland contained an entire mini-story about going to Mars. There's also a blurb about recovering some diamonds and Charamaine sings "On, Wisconsin!"

And, while it isn't a fake passage:

The Premacorin Mural is a work of art which you have only heard rumors about. It records all human history in one vast display of gaudy colors. At the beginning of the display you see the image of Charles Darwin walking arm- in-arm with an ape in a wedding dress. Next to that you see a youthful Egyptian pharaoh in mummy wrappings and a gold mask dancing on the stage of a place called (according to the neon lights behind him) Radio City Museum of Unnatural History. Proceeding along, you see a masked man brandishing silver six-shooters on the back of a silver Tyrannosaurus, hot on the trail of a mustachioed man wearing a swastika. A fat man in a red uniform with white trim flies through the sky in a sleigh pulled by eight F-19 Stealth bombers. He has bags full of guns, ammo and bombs, which he is freely dropping down to King Arthur and his knights so they can battle Genghis Khan and the Yellow Peril. Yet further on a man in a green and gold uniform (with the number 12 emblazoned on it and a 'G' on the helmet) has just thrown a missile to a man vanishing in the white glow of an atomic mushroom cloud. Finally, at the far end of the wall, you see the ape in its tattered wedding dress, squatting and studying the fire-blackened helmet.

The mural appears visually in Wasteland 2.

[Acrux]

The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 had a fake sub-plot about vampires. I remember one was a fake-out of Aragorn being a vampire in disguise.