Photographing the Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup at Gen Con 2025

Gen Con 2025 was an action-packed extravaganza for Distant Era. From running cosplay posing workshops to toy photography workshops to running sound for the Glitter Guild burlesque on Thursday to individual costumed portrait photography sessions on Friday and Saturday to shooting the Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup event on Sunday, Gen Con 2025 was intense.

In the coming weeks (months?) I’ll share images and stories from Gen Con 2025 on The All Worlds Traveller. However, I’ll start in reverse, featuring the last event I photographed on the convention’s final day, the Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup.

The Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup at Gen Con 2025.

But First, Some Context

For those who’ve ended up here without any context: Gen Con is a large tabletop gaming convention in Indianapolis that drew approximately seventy-two thousand attendees in 2025. It was founded in 1968 by Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (hence “Gen Con), six years before he and Dave Arneson published Dungeons & Dragons.

Fearless D20 Cosplay Meetup event lead, AJ.

Dimension 20 is a podcast broadcast on the Dropout streaming subscription service (formerly known as College Humor) where the performers record their actual play sessions (often but not always using the Dungeons & Dragons rules) as a serialized episodic show. It’s so popular that it sold out Madison Square Garden earlier this year.

The Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup is a group in which the participants arrive costumed as characters from the show’s various stories. The event is a place to gather, hang out, and have fun with fellow Dimension 20 enthusiasts. The event is popular enough (again, the show sold out Madison Square Garden this year) to attract a group large enough to hire a photographer (that me!) to capture.

The Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup Event

It was great shooting the Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup after two days of fantasy portraiture, if only for a change of pace. Event photography is a different animal with a different energy and different expectations. I shoot all kinds of events and enjoy doing them, especially when they’re related to my interests, as this one was.

At the beginning of the event, I roved around taking pictures of the participants in their costumes. There was such a happy energy at the Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup, and it was great fun to photograph.

After the initial mingling, the event got underway. We took pictures of the entire gathering—squeezing everyone into frame five rows deep, as in the first picture in this post. After that, we captured each of the various groups of characters together among several different categories, like the ones below.

Only a few of the many groups among the costume categories for the D20 Cosplay Meetup.

Photography

From the photography angle, apart from the regular event coverage, I got to play around a little. Elizabeth, who assisted me during the event, took some behind-the scenes shots with her phone showing some of the fun we had making different kinds of shots.

Behind-the-scenes images from Elizabeth (TOP) vs. the results (BOTTOM).

I thought it might be nice to bring my portrait setup to the Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup to offer something special for the participants, if there was time. This way, each participant who wanted one could have a nice portrait of their costume from the event, and the Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup could show off the details their members had put into their individual costumes.

Individual portraits at the D20 Cosplay Meetup.

After our rapid-fire portrait session, some participants requested a shot up from the floor below, where they stood in front of the giant stained glass window of the old train station, and we captured this very steampunk portrait.

Posing before the big stained glass window at Union Station in Indianapolis.

Thanks

The organizers for the Dimension 20 Cosplay Meetup—AJ, Nico, and Ashton—led such a cheerful, fun gathering attended by good people having a great time, and we’re so very grateful to them for bringing us in to photograph their wonderful event!

The 20 Cosplay Meetup Organizers: Ashton, AJ, and Nico.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.