Costume Craft and Cosplay Highlights from HLGCon 2018

The High Level Games Convention carved out a corner of the Atlantic City boardwalk in 2018, turning the Showboat Hotel into a weekend playground for tabletop fans, live-action roleplayers, and anyone who has ever stitched a foam pauldron at midnight. The cosplay scene at HLGCon 2018 reflected that blend of gaming culture and theatrical dress-up, with costumes inspired by Dungeons & Dragons characters, indie video games, comic runs, and the homebrew worlds that attendees bring to life in their own campaigns.

For Australian readers who cut their teeth on PAX Australia in Melbourne or queue up at AVCon in Adelaide, the Atlantic City gathering may feel a world away, but the visual language of the cosplay floor travels surprisingly well. Aussie players track the North American convention circuit on Discord and Reddit, swapping photos of US costume builds the way they once traded Magic: The Gathering tips at their local games store. HLGCon's mix of LARP, tabletop, and immersive theatre made it a natural fit for that cross-pollination.

What follows is a walk through some of the standout looks captured across the HLGCon 2018 weekend, from hand-stitched fantasy armour to group costumes that turned the exhibitor hall into a moving tableau. The gallery leans on the same inclusive spirit that organisers baked into the event, where a first-time cloaked rogue sat beside a veteran in a powered exosuit and nobody blinked.

Heavy Armour and Medieval Fantasy Builds

Heavy armour builds dominated the Saturday morning floor, and several cosplayers leaned into the medieval-fantasy roots of the convention. A pair of paladins in burnished breastplates held court near the registration desk, their gear polished to a mirror finish that caught the overhead fluorescents every time they turned. Foam worbla and thermoplastic had clearly done the heavy lifting, with hand-painted details mimicking hammered steel and aged brass.

Further down the corridor, a cosplayer dressed as a ranger from a homebrew campaign wore a layered leather harness over a forest-green gambeson, complete with a quiver of EVA foam arrows. The build showed a working archer's sense of balance, with the quiver strap sitting high on the chest for accessibility. It was the kind of functional design that Australian cosplayers often discuss at Supanova meetups, where crafters obsess over whether a sword sits correctly in a scabbard during a long day on the floor.

What made these heavy builds stand out was the weathering. Rather than arriving in factory-clean plastic, many armour sets had been dry-brushed with black and brown to suggest mud, scorch marks, and the patina of long campaigns. A woman in scale-mail had painted each individual scale in alternating tones of copper and silver, an exercise in patience that paid off every time she posed for a photo.

Live-Action Costumes in Motion

HLGCon's LARP programming bled directly into the costume galleries, with several attendees wearing pieces that had seen real use on the live-action field. A group of monster hunters in matching duster coats stalked the hallways between sessions, their outfits accessorised with paper-wrapped stake bundles, leather satchels, and prop pistols that had been cleared at the Detention Breakout check-in to make sure nothing crossed the line into actual weaponry.

The LARP contingent favoured muted, lived-in colour palettes: dusty browns, faded greens, and off-white that suggests hand-washing after a long weekend. One player dressed as a plague doctor had aged a leather mask with tea staining and sanded the edges of a heavy wool cloak until it looked like it had been through three winters. It was a striking contrast to the polished fantasy builds, and a reminder that costume can function as a tool of the character rather than just decoration.

A standout detail was how seamlessly the LARP costumes transitioned into the immersive programming. Players in dark, layered cloaks filed through a quick safety rundown at the start of each session, then disappeared into the detention-themed scenario without missing a beat. The boundary between the convention floor and the immersive story felt genuinely porous, which is part of what made the HLGCon approach to live-action play feel distinct from larger events.

Cyberpunk Suits and Neon Piping

If fantasy armour owned Saturday, cyberpunk and science fiction took over Sunday. A cosplayer in a chromed trench coat with fibre-optic piping down the sleeves spent most of the afternoon fielding questions from curious kids, patiently explaining how the wiring ran to a small battery pack hidden in the lining. The result was a subtle blue glow that pulsed in time with a hidden Arduino, an impressive piece of maker culture that echoes the tinkering ethos of Australian hackerspaces like Brisbane's River City Labs.

A two-person group had built matching space marine suits out of printed 3D armour plates, EVA foam, and a frankly alarming amount of hot glue. Their colour scheme of matte black and hazard orange was clearly inspired by a well-known 40K-adjacent property, but the proportions had been adjusted to fit a taller and a shorter build, a practical lesson many Australian costumers learn the hard way when commissioning matching sets.

One of the most photographed looks belonged to a solo cosplayer in a custom neon duster and mirrored visor, channelling a synthwave version of a street samurai. The mirrored visor had been cut down from a welding helmet and refitted with tinted polycarbonate, a clever budget hack that plenty of Melbourne-based cosplayers have shared on YouTube. The whole look came together under the convention's coloured uplighting, which turned every reflective surface into a small photo opportunity.

Fandom Group Builds and Collaborative Costumes

Group cosplay is where conventions either hum or stumble, and HLGCon 2018 was firmly in the humming camp. A squad of seven players had assembled as the entire main cast of a popular dungeon-crawler video game, each costume individually crafted but matched in palette and silhouette so the group read as a single unit across a crowded room. Their hand-painted shield designs all shared the same heraldic style, with subtle differences that rewarded closer inspection.

A smaller trio dressed as tabletop investigators in 1920s tailoring carried the kind of detail that often comes from obsessive research. Pocket watches had been sourced from op shops, fedoras shaped over a weekend of steaming, and a prop typewriter had been rented from a local prop house to complete the look. It was the kind of build that would have felt right at home at a Sydneyside cult cinema screening, where retro styling attracts the same sort of meticulous crowd.

Even the casual cosplay floor had its share of clever group work. A handful of players wearing matching T-shirts from a popular indie RPG had personalised their outfits with hand-stitched patches representing their individual characters. The shirts doubled as a soft advertisement for the game itself, and several onlookers asked where they could pick up copies, a quietly clever piece of community building that any Australian convention organiser will recognise from the merch tables at SMASH! in Sydney.

Handmade Materials and Budget Builds

Costume craft at HLGCon 2018 was notably DIY in spirit, with a strong contingent of cosplayers who had built their outfits on a tight budget. Worbla scraps, foam offcuts, and fabric remnants from earlier projects all showed up in finished pieces, often with seams deliberately hidden under decorative trim. One builder had constructed an entire druid costume from a thrifted linen curtain, a skill that resonates with Australian costumers used to sourcing materials from Vinnies and Salvos op shops.

A workshop on Saturday afternoon walked attendees through the basics of EVA foam construction, using offcuts donated by a local plastics supplier. The session was standing room only, with participants cutting out basic chest plates and assembling them with contact cement and a heat gun. It was a practical, hands-on counterpoint to the polished builds elsewhere in the hall, and a reminder that not every great costume needs a four-figure budget or a year of lead time.

Several cosplayers also showcased their work on the popular TTRPG systems review boards posted near the exhibitor hall, where they had sketched their own character art alongside the costumes they had built for those very characters. The blend of crafting, performance, and tabletop storytelling felt like the convention's thesis statement in a single corner of the room.

The Inclusive Atmosphere Behind the Costumes

What tied all of these costumes together wasn't a single theme or franchise, but the welcoming atmosphere that HLGCon worked to cultivate. The convention's policies encouraged attendees of all experience levels to participate, from first-time cloaks stitched the week before to multi-year armour builds. Volunteers staffed the check-in desks and the immersive scenarios with a focus on welcoming nervous first-time LARP players, and that same warmth carried over to the cosplay floor.

Volunteer marshals roamed the photo areas with clipboards, gently reminding photographers to ask before snapping close-ups and stepping in if a cosplayer looked uncomfortable. The approach mirrored the kind of community standards that Australian conventions have been pushing for over the last decade, and the con policies briefing on offer at HLGCon spelled those standards out clearly for first-time attendees. Clear reporting pathways and a visible staff presence kept things civil and kept the focus on the costumes and the characters rather than on any single awkward interaction.

By the time the Sunday closing ceremony rolled around, the cosplay floor had become a soft-focus blur of cloaks, foam swords, and group photos. Players swapped social handles, promised to share pattern files, and in several cases, scheduled future campaigns with people they had only just met. The HLGCon 2018 costume gallery will keep living in Discord servers and Instagram feeds for years, but the real souvenir was the reminder that a good convention puts the community at the centre of every photo.

If you want to try a costume of your own, start small with a single accessory that reflects a character you already love, wear it to your next local game night, and let the build grow from there.