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
When the Sixth World Companion was released, I sold the permission to publish some of the metavariants to Pegasus Games, which lead them to appear in the german translation - and paid for even more commissions. A rather huge donation helped paying 4 more illustrations and with the continued help of Patreons all metasapients and SURGE collectives have been illustrated now.
Metasapients, Drakes, Changelings and SURGE collectives and room for more
Merchandise
I really like those illustrations and some of them are especially cool. I thought it might be fun to have them on shirts, bags or whatever and tried to create Merchandise shops ... which was not so easy as I thought it would be.
There is the GetShirts shop, which is a great shop, allows storing image variants for dark or light background and accepted all images without a problem. Unfortunately they only produce in Germany, so international customers need to pay expensive shipping costs.
There also is Spreadshirt, which in theory would deliver to several continents, but rejected 60% of the uploaded images (2 images due to "Copyright" (likely the soccer shirt) and 4 others due to "Quality") and but my account into a kind of probation state that prevents me from selling outside Europe.
