Your character, inventory, containers, and skills all persist. If you die, you will find yourself spawning with your entire equipment and inventory wiped, but your character and any stored items will persist in the world. Merchants, traveling or otherwise, all have their active inventories that will reset based on the world clock; two days.
How it works
What is yours stays yours, except what was on your body when you fell. Stored chests, owned property, account horses, written documents, recorded animation sets, custom-known identities — all of it persists across sessions, across deaths, across the world clock. Your character grows in skill the same way: skills earned are skills kept. The only persistence rule with teeth is the equipment one — what you're wearing or carrying when you die is what others may loot. The merchant economy runs on the same clock as everything else: traveling stockists refresh their wares every two in-fiction days, so what's for sale today is gone tomorrow.
New characters are created from the launcher before you join the server, not from inside the world.
Commands
/character (alias: /sheet) — Open your character sheet.
The launcher-only commands /newcharacter and /characterselect are legacy and route you back to the launcher.
