Have you loaded my NPC/spawn data (
http://www.innersystems.com/~drawde/worlddata0.5.zip) into the DB? In that case, there should be NPCs, merchants etc in most of the city and outdoor zones. However many dungeon zones have errors with all the mobs ending up at the safe point, and there isn't any data for Velious or Luclin. Still though you should see plenty of spawns in most of the "old world" and Kunark zones.
As for creating your own spawns, I think there's a #dbspawn command which spawns a NPC and saves it to the DB, so it will be there next time you start up the server. Type #help in-game for a list of emulator commands.