NEW GUIDELINES FROM MGMT:
1. ORDERS MUST BE 8-12-16 PAGES ONLY, THAT IS ALL THE MACHINE CAN ECONOMICALLY HANDLE
2. BLACK AND WHITE PRINTING ONLY, 8.5 x 11 IN (HALF INCH GUTTER FOR MACHINE ERROR, A4 OK IN OTHER MARKETS)
3. COVER PAGE HANDBILL MUST LIST NAME OF BAND AND ALBUM TITLE
4. NO REFUNDS!

ORDERS WILL BE JUDGED IN THE FOLLOWING WAYS:
HANDBILL - WRITING - THEME - GAMEABILITY - STYLE

HANDBILL - Would you attend this show? Have you ever seen anything like it?

WRITING - Is it as good as the handbill makes it look? Does it live up to the hype? Are there real teeth to this scene?

THEME - Is this a product of the 90s? How much of an aesthetic world did you build for the prompt band name? 

GAMEABILITY - Could you run this at your gaming table tonight? Would you, and do you think it would be fun?

STYLE - How cool does this look? Did this really get printed at a copy shop? How can you tell? Any tradecraft to try in your own zines?

DETAILS

Each entrant will be given 

• the name of a fictional band of no fame, from the 90s. This is the seed of the ensuing work.

Some example band names: 

Machinery of Conditions
Exploding Spider
Foreign Moisture
Betamax Prophet
Five Gallon Dog

Each entry will consist of:

• A handbill for a show that the band is putting on. This cover page is black and white, but may be printed on a vibrant paper color of your choice.
• Adventure material based around the handbill's themes, either 8, 12, or 16 pages exactly. Create an adventure module, an RPG, a new class for an existing system, or anything TTRPG related – all you need is to take inspiration from the given title, and to use that title for your project. Go crazy and have fun!

Entries are meant to represent high effort work using the best technology of 30 years ago - a little grunge is a great effect, but readability is critical too.

WHY DID YOU CREATE THIS JAM?

"You need forms so that people can be free inside them." 

PrinterJam 2026 grew from my experience with the the recent second annual Appendix N Jam, an rpg jam centering the Golden Age of SciFi roots of the hobby, which assigned each entrant a fictional Book Title of a hypothetical genre book, and then asked for no more than 4 A5 pages of Adventure based on that imagined novel.

These constraints produced hundreds of results, a glorious amount of new work. The emergent themes among the group might be summed up this way:

Each of the scenarios had the feeling of, or sometimes was explicitly, a metaphorical afterlife scene, with 3-5 archetypal characters also locked within an interesting, but extremely constrained physical situation (a town-temple suspended in the stomach of a demon-owl; two pyramids inverted above and below each other, crushing time between their antithetical points; an extremely small and explorable moonlette,  etc)

This Jam seeks to adjust the dials a bit, and see if a wider variation might be achieved with bigger pages, and more of them. I didn't want to step on the Golden Age of SciFi toes of Appendix N, either, so I adjusted that dial too.

I started to think about the late 90s RPG material I encountered, often printed at the town Copy Shop and sent by mail-order, or circulated through similar channels to the music zines, show handbills, and other photocopier-creations that were the paper trail of the local cultural scene. It thrived on limitations: black and white only, with greyscale fields quickly turning to unique grainy decay. Diagrams turned to pointillistic impressions after the second reproduction, while the roughness of material, physical collage and tape and clipped magazine illustrations was smoothed and leveled by the same process. 

Dungeon Magazine #3, produced professionally in 1987, has the visual style which, by the late 1990s, independent RPG material was successfully imitating with consumer-grade tools and local printing.

RESOURCES:

Texturelabs Xerox Machine Noise

270 Punk Flyers from the 90s (Reddit Thread and Google Photo Folder)