• Newly-created Mage character is stuck in an empty fade stage (mountainous/fade-ish) area near Haven at beginning of game. This looks like it's the fade area you're in during character creation; your character is not moved forward into the cutscene in the dungeon.
  
• Unable to save character, health bar at a small sliver, 8/8 health potions and 3 available spell talent points
• Nothing to interact with, no beginning-of-game instructional text
• Able to walk to Haven, and even to the Temple
• Appears to be machine-specific; my machine's stats:
• Intel Core i7 950 3.07Ghz Quad Core, 12 GB RAM, NVidia 750 Ti with updated drivers, game settings optimized through GeForce Experience, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, 1.2TB available disk space. Hard drive is a little under a year old - had to replace a failing one last Christmas.
• Updated note: as a commenter pointed out, it doesn't appear to matter what the machine stats are as it is happening to both low and high end machines. It does seem to be PC-only, however.
  
• Doesn't matter if the character is customized or if one of the defaults is used. Race doesn't appear to matter, either.
• Making another class (rogue) worked fine for me; others are seeing this on warrior and rogue as well
  

• Try to trigger Origin to bring down cloud saves and overwrite your local saves (do a backup first!) by turning off cloud saving in Origin, create a dummy save, then turning it back on - or - if you have Origin cloud save on, move your saves out from the Save folder, open Origin, and that should trigger it. After creating your new character, move your backed-up saves back in. (Your saves are located in My Documents > Bioware > Dragon Age Inquisition > Save)
  
• Using the 60fps fix for conversations has apparently caused this issue for some. If you have added this, or any, parameter/command line argument to your Dragon Age: Inquisition shortcut on your desktop, take it out. You can also try launching the game from Origin, as this bypasses the shortcut. There were other ways to put the 60fps change in besides the desktop shortcut, though, so any way you added it, back that change out, then try again. (see below for how)
• Right click on the game in Origin and choose Repair Game. Let it finish then relaunch. (this fix courtesy of @poetsprince - thank you! :))
• Be sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card installed.
  
• Try setting your graphics to "Low". This appears to sometimes happen when people try to run in a higher graphics mode than their machines can handle.
• If you are trying this on an unpatched game, try patching the game. On PC, you right click the game in Origin and click Update. Prior to Patch 2, all games were forced to Ultra shader quality and it may have been too much for your machine to deal with. Once downloaded and updated completely, set your graphics to low and try again. If it works you can raise them back to a higher level if you wish.
• Try skipping the cutscene after the character creator (press ESC repeatedly right from when the character creator starts fading out until it skips completely or you get a "Skip" button in the lower left, this may take a few tries to get right)
• Try deleting the saves and profiles from My Documents > Bioware > Dragon Age Inquisition > Save (Make a backup first, then put them back in later)
• From one of our many fine commenters below, angela_mchee, comes this suggestion that worked for her: If you have another character already, log in with it and trigger a cutscene (could be a conversation or something during a quest, whatever it takes to trigger an auto save). After the auto save, save and log out, and try again to make a new character. (thank you!)

I first encountered this bug when I tried to make a mage character. All I really wanted to do was to get the save ready and set my Dragon Age Keep exported save back to my daughter's, as she doesn't understand the Keep as well as I do. Then I'd have that beginning save ready for when I wanted to play. The problem came when, after I went through character creation, she woke up after her collapse in an empty fade "stage". It looks like the mountain where you try to reach the white shiny lady. There are small pools all around, and around that are snowy mountains with the breach in the sky spitting out small meteors that hit the ground.

The first time it happened, it just felt like a bug. I wasn't completely sure, so I tried wandering around a bit. I was not able to save, my health bar was at a small sliver, there was nothing to interact with and no instructional text. For the beginning of a game that just isn't right, but then again the Fade is weird and she was a mage, so there was always the possibility she just had to find her way out. I ended up blue-screening about 10 minutes later.

At this point, I tried tweeting out a general question asking if it was a bug. Didn't receive a reply from anyone.

In any case, I took her back upstairs to the area where the burnt corpses are, and that's where she is stuck - can't get out anywhere.

I tried tweeting John Epler directly, with pictures of what I was seeing, but didn't get a response.

I then tried a third Mage, choosing the default appearance this time - I wanted to see if the character creator had anything to do with it, and also wanted to see if those talent points were there in the beginning, and they were. Also see the screenshot showing the inability to save the game.