That kind of cliche is OK, it's pretty standard for D&D. My major pet peeve is Cloud-like storylines, those piss me off.

Hero, I linked to the SRD in my posts, that's a good tool to use for character generation, all the rules are there.

The two presented characters are more or less acceptable, although it'd be nice if Morphius' backstory was completed (it looks like it's missing a few words).