If you start playing as a player in a homebrew world that I built. How little information would you feel needed to be able read before you can build a character in it?

I mean, nothing. I’ll just assume standard fantasy tropes exist somewhere, keep my pitch brief and anywhere I need proper names you’ll get or whatever.

It’s not ideal but I’ve done it plenty of times.

Not to mention would you as a player like reference to other mediums so you could quickly know what to expect or would you rather have a in game view of it?

Comparisons with other media can be a powerful shorthand, but reference the wrong things and it can be extremely off-putting. Over the years I’ve learned that DMs referencing some media, even things I like, can be a massive red flag. Nothing triggers my flight instinct from a game quicker than seeing the advert reference anime.

For my homebrew world, I wrote a two page document covering:

• Geography: the rough layout of their starting city (the main districts and well-known landmarks), the main species that can be seen around the city (they’re not limited to playing these, but I think it’s helpful if you’re going to play a dragonborn to know whether you’re an outsider in this city or not), and a high-level sentence each on the handful of main locations that can be easily travelled to from the city - i.e. the stuff that any resident should know.

• Magic and religion: the pantheon of major gods and their domains, and a line noting there are other religious/magical traditions but most residents of the city would be unfamiliar with them.

• Politics: how the city is governed, who the noble houses are, and what reputation is widely known about each of them (not all of these are deserved…)

• History: some very high-level history of the city and world (at the level that an average resident would know - the equivalent of the name of this world’s Roman Empire who founded the city, and what happened to them).

I figured that two pages is short enough for anyone to read and get some sense of the world I’m dropping them in, without going into so much detail that it takes away their ability to explore the world (which is dramatically bigger than the city).

There’s also no real cost to people not remembering what’s in the two-pager - people can get away with assuming it’s a fairly generic fantasy world at first and I can easily resupply key info while DMing - but I figure most players like to know a bit about the game world before they start.

Give them no more than a page. However, you should also be able to boil your setting down to a sentence. “It’s kinda somewhere between Mass Effect’s story and the world of Dragon Age, but more low-tech” was my elevator pitch to my players.

Only the bare minimum to run the narrative arc. I don’t need to know how many gods created your world, or how many cities with unpronounceable names there are out there. Keep that info handy in case it comes up (for example, the pantheon may come up if we seek refuge in a church, or there’s religious tension in the country or whatever), but don’t spend 30 minutes telling me the minute details of your world, because I’ll probably forget by the time we play together again next week.

You need enough lore to explain where the PCs fit into the world, both for their races/backgrounds and for their current adventure. Some of this can be plenty vague: you don’t need to know everything about the elven city states yet, just that they exist and one of your PCs grew up there. You don’t need an entire pantheon, just the gods your PCs worship. The details that are most important are for the local area: what might the PCs need to know, and what would they want to see? Who runs the town? Where are the rat catchers going? And what will hook them on their next adventure?

Generally I start with a vibe, usually generic fantasy land since that’s what people are most familiar with.

Then I plan out the local town and the countryside around it: Portland Court used to be an ancient tiefling city-state but that was so long ago the only real reminders of that era are the large basalt bricks people still recycle for building and the occasional weird bones folks still find in the nearby fields. Now it’s mostly just humans doing what humans do, scratching out a living using whatever they can. The name court refers to the central open market and the successful merchants who are the defacto leaders of the community.

Then I work with the PCs for a little background. There’s a dwarf in my party and she hails from the nearby Iron Mountains. A cleric worships Sol and Luna, twin gods who embody the sun and moon. There’s also a halfling who grew up south of the Court, in the Roving Prairies.

Finally I try to fit everything together: the local merchants need guards for a caravan going to the next town over because the demon-worshipping cultists who want to revive the dead empire keep knocking over wagons and stealing goods. This is good tension even if it’s not very original. Plus it gives the party opportunities to continue adventuring and, if they choose, learn more about the ancient history most people would rather keep forgotten. The merchants will need more help, and the cultists will keep escalating until someone does something about it once and for all.

Hope that makes sense. I like to start small and build up as the party adventures and the stakes get higher, with just enough thought out that I can give the worldbuilding direction when I go back to it.