I keep hearing about vairants of the basic metahuman types like Spike Babies, Oni, Minotaurs and the such so I have three questions?

1) Which books are they located in?
2) What are they, I hear them mentioned on the forums but other than that I the only variants I've ever read in the books where the oni in the Year of the Comet.
3) What is the difference between the variant and the real kind, like the Oni and the Ork (if I member it right).

1. SR Companion has all the metahuman variants that I am aware of.

2. Most of them are pretty bizarre, cyclops, minotaur, etc.

3. From a game mechanic standpoint, most are either less usefull versions of the regular metatype or a munchkin's delight, notably the gnome and night one.

First of all: Spike babies =/= metavariants

As for your questions:
1.) Shadowrun Companion
2.)

Spike babies: persons born in meta human form before 2011 ... Appearantly not too many of them exist. Mostly elfs (Dodger e.g.), possibly some dwarfs. No orcs or trolls

Metavariants: Special forms of the know metahuman races, commonly tied to certain locations around the globe. Not all members of a specific metahuman race do display those special traits. Most of them express traits that make them resemble to mythological figures from the area in question (like the Cyclops or the Minotaur)

3.) certain different physical traits (different racial modifiers)

So these variants are pretty much for flavor only?

Depends on your perspective on SR ...
Metavariants are relatively rare, thus most of them will be instantly recognized as being different. According to background info they are usually looked upon as "Freaks" even by the members of their original race.

So if you're more into a gritty, cyberpunkish version of SR, then there won't be many possibilities for playing a metavariant as Runner.
Let's assume that you have a cyclops instead of a normal troll ... Those guys usually come from Greece and the number of cyclopses in Seattle can most likely be counted with a single hand. Now let's assume that this cyclops was involved in a shoot-out with witnesses: There was this big friggin guy that looked like a troll gone freak... Had just one eye and a single horn right on the forehead ...
How big are the chances that our cyclops will sooner or later end up in front of a judge, simply because he ran into a normal police control? Unless he stays in Z-Zone areas all the time ... but those aren't the areas where most shadowruns take place.

If you ignore the rarity of metavariants and enjoy freakish SR-charcters then you'll have more than enough room to have "fun" with them ...
And as KillaJ indicated, some of them can be abused better while others are a rather bad deal when looking at the mere cost factor (this is why some groups simply ignore the extra cost of metavariants).

Although, if you allow for SURGE effects, you could have ended up with a lot more one-eyed, one-horned (though not necessarily flying or purple people eating) changlings in seattle.

The likelyhood of a normal troll suffering a change to a metavariant via SURGE is rather low however ...

You can compensate by taking the Blandness Edge.

Pedestrian: "This huge troll with only one eye and a pink mohawk just robbed the Stuffer Shack!"

LoneStar Cop: "I see. Did this one-eyed troll with a pink mohawk have any distinguishing features?"

Pedestrian: "Um... no."

LoneStar Cop: "Damn."

For some reason, I get the picture of a cyclops pasting a plastic eye to the side of his head as a disguise, like Leela did in the "Single Female Lawyer" episode of Futurama....

"Yeah... he was pretty human looking, Officer... for a guy with one eye and a giant horn."

The way I've always viewed Metavarients is that they are the only game in town when it comes to those ones tied to certain areas.

I.E. There are no Japanese Orks, only Oni.

Dryads are an exception, as they can show up any where nature-esq, and the Night Ones, which seem to be scattered evenly across Europe. But most of the others I can say "you can only find here". Greece and the Meddeteranian seem to be crawling with mostly metavarients in my view.

But even if you tie metavariants to a specific ethnic group, you would still have a fair amount of them in the UCS and UCAS, because the old USA was a melting pot with immigrants from just about every other country in the world.

I'm not sure I would run them by saying that all members of an ethnic group turn into metavariants - that would make them a lot less rare, which I don't think was the intent with them. I would probably use them as recessive variants even within the ethnic group that they spring from.


By the way, I was kidding about the Blandness Edge... I thought the dialogue made the irony pretty clear.