Support file · Open
The campaign has not opened, which means the most useful support available right now is not money. It is attention, correction, and the spread of a project that is trying to do something unusual: build an escape room that refuses to make anything up about a real killing.
This page is the whole list — what helps before a single pledge exists, what the money will do when it moves, and how to make sure the launch date reaches you first.
Dallas, Texas·Campaign: not yet live·Opening date: TBA
Item 01 · Costs nothing
A history teacher, a librarian, a museum educator, a civics chair, a neighbour who still argues about 1963. Rooms like this are booked by word of mouth long before they are booked by advertising, and one person who forwards the idea is worth more than a hundred impressions.
Name one person, then send them this page.
The journal is the best introduction the project has: the plaza itself, the Oak Cliff afternoon, a day in Dallas on the record. A forwarded article explains what the room is without asking anybody to pledge anything, and it arrives with its sources attached.
Pick one dispatch and forward it as-is.
Every claim on this site is published with the document behind it. If something is misread, under-cited or flatly wrong, telling us is support rather than criticism: the corrections are the product, and a room that cannot survive being read closely should not open.
Leave a field note under the dispatch or the map.
Carpentry and scenic build, poster and letterpress printing, archival scanning, audio captioning, accessibility review, translation, playtest hours from people who have run rooms before. A build of this size runs on borrowed competence as much as on money.
Say what you do in a field note; every one is read.
School departments, library programmes, museum education offices, historical societies, veterans' and teachers' associations. Educator and group interest is collected before launch precisely so a classroom session can be scoped properly instead of improvised after the doors are open.
Pass the page to a department or a programme.
1960s office furniture, crates and cabinetry, trade catalogues, a print shop's ledger, a storeroom being cleared out, an estate with a box of unpulled office film. Every reproduction has to start from a real object, and most of them start with somebody's attic.
Describe it in a field note, or reply to an update.
Your support ledger
0 of 6 filed
Ticks stay on this device only — nothing is sent, nothing is stored on the project's side.
Item 02 · When you are ready to pay
Money is welcome, and it is also the last thing the project needs from you. If and when you want to put it behind the build, this is the order the steps happen in.
Now
Nothing is charged and nothing is committed. Your address puts you in the founding-backer window, which is the only seating that is priced and stocked before the public ever sees the reward sheet.
At launch
Five tiers from a $25 digital campaign pack to a $1,000 puzzle sponsorship with a dedication marker built into the room. The $85,000 goal is published line by line so a pledge can be measured against work, not against a mood.
First week
Small campaigns are decided in the opening days, when a project is either rising or not. A pledge in week one does more for the build than the same pledge in week four — and it is the week the founding credits are cut.
The link that does not change
oswaldescaperoom.com/kickstarter
Print it on a flyer, put it in a bio, hand it to a librarian. When the campaign opens, this address is where the project lives — nothing you already handed out has to be redone.
The pitch, if you would rather send it as written
Oswald: Escape from the Sixth Floor — a historically accurate escape room about the JFK assassination, being built in Dallas, Texas. Sixty minutes on the sixth floor, built to the public record.
Item 03 · What the money becomes
A room that reads like 1963 rather than a set dressed to suggest it: storage bays, crates, cabinetry, lighting, the window bay.
Props that trace back to a named document, so nothing in a player's hands contradicts the record it is supposed to teach.
Fabrication, locks and sensors, and three full playtest cycles — the work that stops a puzzle teaching the wrong thing.
Step-free routing, captioned audio and lighting that never traps a player. The part of a build that gets cut first and shouldn't.
The goal is a working budget of $85,000 and it will be re-published as the final quote sheet the day the campaign opens. Nothing here is a placeholder for a number we would rather not say out loud.
Item 04 · On file
Backers get rewards, credits and early seating. Nobody gets the sourcing moved, a claim softened, or the day turned into a thrill ride. Those limits are the reason the project is worth building.
The commitments
Item 05 · Stay updated
One address, no account, no password. It is the only channel that carries the campaign date, the reward sheet and the founding-backer window before they appear anywhere else on the site.
What arrives
The launch date, the reward sheet, build notes from the floor, and playtest results as they land.
How often
When there is something real to report. Not on a schedule, and not to fill a quota.
What never happens
The list is not sold, traded or handed to an advertising network. Unsubscribe is one click and stays effective.
Item 06 · The desk is open
Artefact leads, skills, a school department that would take a session, a correction to a citation on this page: leave it here and it reaches the same moderation desk as the journal notes. Sign-in keeps the desk civil; nothing is published without approval.
Field notes · 0 on file
Readers file notes on this exhibit. Keep to the record: sources, corrections, and questions are welcome; notes are reviewed before they post, and no theory is presented as fact.
Sign in to file a field note on this exhibit.