Just to be absolutely clear, this will contain spoilers for the chapter mentioned in this blog post's title.

I've been quite forward about the fact that many of the characters in Lateral Movement, particularly Lex and Sonata, have their powers and abilities represented via RPG stats under the d20 System, the game engine upon which Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition and Pathfinder, are built.

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Spoiler alert for chapter 160 – Breakthrough and Breakdown.

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"The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children." –Benjamin Disraeli

Despite the wisdom of the above quote, I wanted to write about the events that led to my writing this story in general, and the conception and evolution of its main character, Lex Legis, in particular. It's my hope that this will serve as an interesting peek behind the metaphorical curtain for fans of this story.

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Spoiler alert for chapter 241 - Full Potential and chapter 242 - Breaking Point.

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Note that this blog post will reference events through chapter 212 - Fixing What's Broken.

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Lateral Movement is, in simplest terms, the story of Lex Legis, my original character. However, if you've read the previous entry in these design diaries, you'll know that the character actually predates the story by over a year; even his first appearance in David Silver's A Dangerous Sparkle came over eight months after his first write-up

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In the course of Lateral Movement, one of the powers that Lex Legis makes liberal use of is his ability to lay curses on other people. A product of his dark magic, he primarily utilizes this as a method of dispensing justice to those who've worked against the common good, though he's not above deploying it as a weapon in a combat situation or other dangerous scenario. As Lateral Movement is closely predicated on the d20 System role-playing game rules, we're going to examine the

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Spoiler alert for chapter 245 - Army of One and chapter 246 - Fatal Flaw.

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