I recently noticed that the Dragon Above/Eberron Beastiary has gone offline. It was an amazing collection of monsters. I asked on one of the Eberron forums but have received no response.
When looking at the Eberron forum I noticed a distinct lack of activity. Dark Sun is active. Forgotten Realms has activity between the two. It makes me wonder if Wizards of the Coast has turned the campaign settings into fads. Each previous campaign fadding after the release of the next one with Forgotten Realms hanging on to more users due to the continueing Living Forgotten Realms.
This is probably good for Wizards' bottom line but for setting fans it is more difficult. Having people excited and talking about the setting can spur creativity and allows you to bounce ideas off each other. On the flip side you have the problem of too much official material that DMs sometimes feel incapable of diverging and creating their own direction.
Dragon and Dungeon still produce material for the older campaigns but not every month. The list of articles here for Eberron shows some significant holes. Even those articles listed may not tie very closely to Eberron. Playing Warforged for example included a different origin for Warforged in the Points of Light setting.
The settings might be better served by producing a setting focused piece like the Dragonshards articles every month. Ideally it would be free content to encourage interest in the setting. Even if only occassionally free the content could ignite the community.
