Grim-faced Freris, sworn to vengeance on the slayers of her kin, was my character for the Dungeon magazine Shackled City Adventure Path D&D campaign.
When designing Freris, I had several goals. I wanted to explore the D&D magic system in play, as the 3rd edition D&D characters I've played over the past three years have had little or no spellcasting ability. I wanted my character to be a dwarf, as most of the dwarves I'd seen played in the preceding few years tended to be greedy, selfish, and unheroic, and I'm a little tired of dwarves being played "against type". In my opinion, dwarves and elves both have well-defined cultural templates (thanks to a number of factors, including Tolkien and 30 years of D&D itself), and there's a lot of scope in the "typical dwarf" that isn't usually explored in play. In particular, I aimed to portray a character defined by their sense of honour and pride, and not by their greed for wealth. Frugal, yes: greedy, no.
I also wanted to make oaths (taking and giving) an important element of this character. Orcs killed Freris' family when she was a child thirty years ago, and she swore oaths to revenge herself on the killers and avenge her family's murders. Those oaths were made in haste by a child and poorly thought through, but are as binding on her as if she had made them as a calm adult. I arranged with the GM for Freris to take her vengeance relatively early in the campaign, so that her charactisation for most of the campaign was about adjusting to life after partially completing her 30-year quest and finding a new purpose in life (namely becoming powerful enough to true resurrect her family).
Freris true resurrected her family in the last session we played, which was very enjoyable - particularly the way her parents thought she was a wastrel for spending 100,000 gp on bringing them back to life, and withheld their approval until Beren explained that Freris was spending only a quarter of her wealth. Unfortunately, one of the four players had already stopped attending sessions at that point, so the game stalled and we never completed the final chapter of the Adventure Path.