Story Behind the Coloring Book?

[Voadam]

What is the story behind the Coloring Book 2002 Celebrity Edition? I bought this a while ago and I'm not sure exactly what the story behind it is. Many of the monsters are illustrated by the two Robinsons, but some are not, such as Stitches Boy by Philip J. Reed the prolific pdf writer.

It gives as credits

CREDITS
CREATED BY
Chrystine & Genevieve Robinson
ILLUSTRATIONS
Genevieve & Chrystine Robinson
ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS
rk Post, Aaron Williams, Cassondra Sweep, Todd Morasch,
Doug Herring, Scott Purdy, Samuel Fudge, Jonathan Tweet,
Tessa Tweet, Philip J Reed, Tyler Ray, Nicholas Jerkat,
Skeleton Key Ed, Toren Atkinson.
LAYOUT AND DESIGN
M Jason Parent
CONCEPT AND CRAYONS
Denise Robinson

So did the two girls come up with all the monster concepts and you had guest artists? Does "Design" indicate M Jason turned the monster concepts into game stats and written descriptions?

At the end it says:

"This adventuresome duo have encountered
and catalogued all the beasts, monsters
and wildlife found within these pages,
and have provided us not only with their
observations, but also with sketches of the
creatures in question.

"They encourage other young adventurers
to catalogue and submit any new and interesting
creatures they find for the second
volume of this book."

Was this the second volume and integrated with the first? I seem to recall on the boards before this came out an open call for game designers to have their kids submit stuff. Are the ones not illustrated by the robinson by the ones who illustrated them (or their kids)?

So what is the story here, I'm all curious now.

 

[HellHound]

There have been two editions of the Kid's Colouring Book o Critters.

The First (Gen Con 2002) Edition

The story behind the first edition of the colouring book was one afternoon, Denise and I were both busy with other work (I was writing Three Arrows for the King, she was rebuilding the township's website), and the kids were begging to game. So Denise tells them to get out a few books of animals and draw some new monsters for the game. So they do - the first of these were amalgams / chimeras of two different animals , but some were more unique than that.

So we took all these creatures, and had the girls come up with descriptions of the creatures, what they do, and so on, including what special abilities they wanted for them. I sat down with them and a spreadsheet and worked out the stats for the critters based on these descriptions, and typed in all the information (creatively editing on the fly so it sounded more like a monster book than the ramblings of excited children).

We then put these monsters together into a digest-sized booklet, and the girls invested their own money into photocopying and saddle-stitching 50 copies of the booklet. They brought them to GenCon 2002, and sold them to random passers-by at the Mystic Eye Games booth. It was a hit, and Monte Cook talked about it (and the girls) on his website as one of the top 10 things about GenCon that year.

Now the fun begins... the back of the book had a few pages for people to add their own monsters to it. And Fish saw the book, loved it, and added an illo to the back of one copy. And then a few other artists added illos (many of these we never got the rights to print, unfortunately). And then Denise made photocopies of the 'draw your own' page, and handed them out willy-nilly for the rest of the con. And we got a bunch back, and others were mailed to us afterwards.

And they went into:

The Celebrity Edition

The celebrity edition includes all the original monsters in the GenCon edition, but also a few new ones from the girls and the ones we could trace back and get permission to publish, as well as some new ones that Denise managed to hunt down from other artists such as rk post, Phil Reed, and Nicholas Jerkat (son of Alexander Jerkat, of Eden Studios)...

This one we put together in a revised format (still under the guidance of the girls), added a new cover, and then publsihed in PDF format as well as a print edition that we sold at GenCon the next year as well as on RPGMall.

The second volume of the product, however, never came about. There wasn't enough material coming in, and the girls only published one additional monster since then - a full-page illustration & stats in an issue of Dungeon / Polyhedron.