Just redownloaded the game to mess about in the character-creator.
Made a bunch of characters that I now wanted to test out for a bit and, lo and behold, most of them are missing. Only the three last characters I made, and 2 characters I tried to play this game with from older builds are in the "load"-section of the game.

Is there a limit on characters in the save-menu?
Or is there a minimum amount of "playtime" you need for a char to not get automatically deleted when you create a new one?
Both options seem utterly retarded designchoices to me, in a game where a lot of fun is to be had in planing out your builds and theorycrafting nice class-combos.
It couldn't possibly be a cloudspace limitation, seeing how this game is on GoG and my SDD has more than enough space left.

Can someone clue me in on this?

There are 3 autosave slots and 3 quicksave slots in total for all the characters.
Did you save manually with unique save name?

I see. I didn't save manually, so the autosaves were deleted.
And you're right. I forgot about the mercenarys you could hire from that NPC. Would probably make for an easier and quicker way to play around with builds.

Thanks for the answers, both of you!

Edit: 2k gold for a mercenary at the first safe place. That's hard to achieve early to test out some classes. So it's still going through that short tutorial and into the game to really test out chars.