How do you promote your homebrews?

Lot of people have put their own homebrew fantasy worlds online. The strongest motivation usually is to see these worlds in some coherent written form. Being able to share it with lots of other people is a nice, added bonus.

Yet in the end, we all crave feedback. We want others to tell us what they liked about our setting, what they didn't like, and how it could be improved in someways.

Unfortunately, there are many, many homebrew worlds out there, and any single one is likely to get lost in that vast sea of information unless its creators go to some extra effort to promote it.

Personally, for my own setting, I have created a mailing list, but so far it has not seen much in the way of fruitful discussion - for the most part, I have mentioned my latest website updates there, and that was it.

Recently, I have started a webcomic set in that world, but since this is still a relatively recent effort, it is hard to say how this will work out. I have also installed a shoutbox on both the comic and the main setting page which will hopefully be a more convenient way of giving feedback than sending emails or even joining the mailing list.

And as I prepare running an online adventure for a GURPS Eberron campaign for the first time, I find myself pondering running some online games set in that world as well - this will cause people to actually play the setting (as opposed to just reading it) and give me more insight into how to improve the world - and the chat logs might make for good reading, too...


So, what have you done to promote your homebrew? Did you use some special website design tricks, or have you done other promotional efforts?

Well.... just a thought... considering that many here on ENworld have homebrew worlds, maybe there could be a forum for it, where homebrews can be discussed?

On a side note, sometimes the websites of homebrews look very nice, and are indexed left right and center. Though this is helpful when browsing about a bit, to have the information available in a single .doc or .pdf is very useful for download, printing and reading at leasure... This may increase the amount of ppl who are willing to truly read your stuff and comment about it... just IMHO...

Whisper72 said:

On a side note, sometimes the websites of homebrews look very nice, and are indexed left right and center. Though this is helpful when browsing about a bit, to have the information available in a single .doc or .pdf is very useful for download, printing and reading at leasure... This may increase the amount of ppl who are willing to truly read your stuff and comment about it... just IMHO...

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That reminds me - I actually have such a document, and it did indeed seem to attract lots of new people. Though I don't update it as often as the website...

Whisper72 said:

Well.... just a thought... considering that many here on ENworld have homebrew worlds, maybe there could be a forum for it, where homebrews can be discussed?

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Could be worth a thought. Any admins willing to weigh in on this?

Once I get everything conveted to 3.5 I'm going to start working on either a list of .doc files or one large .pdf but I'm not sure which. It was a setting a friend of mine started and eventually gave all the campaign notes and journals to me. After research I found he borrowed some gods from the different setting, changed some towns and imported them and even the ages from Dragonlance were apart of it. I'm going to keep some of these things and change the rest, mostly things that the players never dealt with or rarely encountered.

All Ive ever done was have my little sig and quote.


Amazingly enough, a few years ago someone sent me an email saying my setting sounded neat and asking about it. It completely Flabberghasted me. Wish I remembered who it was.


Unexpected (and highly needed) ego boost.

KeithCrimson said:

Once I get everything conveted to 3.5 I'm going to start working on either a list of .doc files or one large .pdf but I'm not sure which.

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Use PDF - it is platform-independent and easier to print out. Not everyone uses Microsoft Word, after all...

I've also noticed that if you use .doc documents on different computers with slightly different setups, the layout can be shot to smithereens. PDF avoids all that.

I have a link in my sig to some information I started posting on a thread on EnWorld, though that link might not exist anymore. But beyond that, it doesn't really matter to me how many people look at it beyond those in my group. I started a thread partly to organize, partly for my players to look at it when they want, and partly to see if anyone would give me feedback, though no one has.

I do have a question though: what's the purpose of promoting your homebrewn world since likely, the only people playing in it are those in your group? The only thing I might do is yoink ideas, though maybe that's just me. Unless, of course, I was planning on trying to sell it, which I likely wouldn't.

Dog_Moon2003 said:

I do have a question though: what's the purpose of promoting your homebrewn world since likely, the only people playing in it are those in your group? The only thing I might do is yoink ideas, though maybe that's just me. Unless, of course, I was planning on trying to sell it, which I likely wouldn't.

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Actually, I do plan to sell it eventually, once I consider it to be "ready" (which will likely still be some time away...).

I think flogging would provide an excellent incentive to promote interest in your homebrew. A few stripes applied here and there and people might be beating feet to have a look at what you've got going. Or Spam, that's got to be effective, right?