This is an important day for me. Since 18 months now, I have been working on Commlink 6, initially alone, later with the help of my wife Anja for the PDF export and Robert as a data editor. Today I am releasing a version 1.0.0 and consider this to be a Beta test.

The motivation​

When I initially started working on Genesis sometime in 2015, I was making a character generation software for a a german fantasy RPG that had just been released. Over the years, I added support for other RPGs and redesigned the user interface. I even started support for Shadowrun 5, but I wasn't aware of all the complexity and requirements of that game system and with Chummer5 being the go-to software, I abandoned it. When early in 2019 Pegasus asked if I would make another attempt with Shadowrun 6, I agreed. Taking lessons learned from SR5, I made the SR6 support even more versatile - and complex. Still, Shadowrun being a mess with rule details, exceeded my complexity expectations, which became obvious after the release of the rigger book in 2021.

Unlike all other RPGs (except Star Wars perhaps), Shadowrun offers a large amount of playable species. Illustrations for most have been created over the course of several editions, but they don't have an identical art style and often doesn't feature on the physical features of the metatypes or metavariants. I wanted to change that and decided to pay an artist to do that. My choice was Andreas 'Rabenaas' Schroth, who already illustrated for Shadowrun for several years.
The requirement was that for each metatype there should be a male and female version, at least one of them should show physical features (like fur or dermal deposits, special hair ...) and they should fit together on a square image. Initially I only commissioned the 2x5 metatypes, but with more steady income by the Patreon and some other savings, I extended the commission step by step.

All metatypes and their variants