If you mean built-in penalties, then no, however there are a lot of good reasons why a player would choose to stay with a mediocre semi-active fellowship, than join a newly created one. For example:
- Less neighbourly help: i.e. not just less people visiting them, but also less people to visit. A half-dead fellowship may still have lots of members to visit, even if they're not active.
- Fewer trades: again, this is a symptom of any small fellowship, new or otherwise.
- Unproven fellowship: maybe one day soon your fellowship will be decent, or maybe it'll peter out and die. Potential members have no way to know in advance. Even if you're confident you can build up your fellowship to the point where it's decent (or even amazing), potential members may be unwilling to take the risk, and will focus on what it's capable of now, not what it might be capable of in the near or distant future.
- Less rewards: even a mediocre fellowship that's dying a quiet death may be getting better rewards than yours simply because yours is so small and new.
- Leaving friends behind: if people have good friends in their current fellowship, and they don't want to all move across as a group, then they may prefer to stay where they are, even if the game benefits are less than what they'd get with your fellowship.
Note that these factors are only relevant if your new members are coming from another fellowship to yours. If they're not in a fellowship at all a lot of these won't apply. Your fellowship is automatically better than no fellowship at all. Perhaps one good method would be to focus on players who don't have fellowships yet, or who have no or few other active members in their current fellowships. Once you have your population up a bit then you'll lessen the impact of factors associated with small fellowships (e.g. neighbourly help, trades) and therefore be more attractive to new members. Likewise, once your fellowship has been around a little while you'll be able to better demonstrate what you're capable of, and may also be able to use the increase in your capabilities to make evidence-based claims about what you may be capable of in the future, rather than just speculate.
I wouldn't worry about the tournament or adventure issue that Rillian mentions. Although it's true that players will want to get the rewards before leaving, all this means is if they want to join your fellowship they may postpone it a few days. That's just a matter of timing, and I wouldn't expect it to influence recruitment.
That's all I can think of for now. There may be other factors I've forgotten though. Hope that helps.
