On Location: High Rise

On Location is an occasional series about places that are good settings for the World After Bliss, and hints on ways you might want to use them in your game.

Today's topic is "high rise" apartment buildings. Less common than they once were, you still see plenty of them at the upper end of the apartment/condo market in and near major cities. There are also still a few surviving high rise developments from the 60s-70s era when they were built as subsidised housing, although most of those have since been demolished. This article is mostly going to concentrate on the more luxurious end of the scale, since those are so much more common.

Like a lot of big buildings with lots of glass and dependencies on things like water pressure, electricity, and central heating/cooling, they'll be significantly less habitable after 7 years of neglect. Many, perhaps most, will have been ravaged by fire and weather damage. (This is one place where the old public-housing high rises are probably better off. All that low-tech concrete construction and minimal infrastructure that made them so unlivable now means that they're more likely to remain habitable post-Bliss.)

Still, there's plenty of reason a high rise might show up in your Bliss Stage game. It would make a very defensible location for a small group, with the only access being narrow stairwells (easily trapped/blocked, great field of fire and bottlenecks for defenders). You could use the roof for small-scale agriculture and rainwater collection, as long as you could avoid attention from the Enemy. So make a high rise home to an important gang, a significant survivor, or even your Resistance.

Alternatively, the inaccessibility might mean that apartments in these places would be good places to find useful stuff. If you could brave the fire and water damage, dangerous stairwells, and other scavengers, you might come home with something really unique.

A building like this is a natural landmark, so it may attract survivors to meeting places nearby: "We meet in the park near that big orange-y apartment tower west of the river." Look around your neighborhood for the buildings that stand out over the skyline all by themselves - chances are (if you don't live in a central city area) at least a few of them are high rise apartment/condo towers.

Because they're often set away from other buildings a little, they'll be spared the worst of firestorms. While internal fires and lightning-strike fires may do some damage, they're less likely to get gutted than those cheek-by-jowl office towers downtown.

Of course, a building like this might be the sort of place the Enemy keeps a close eye on. Depending on what your Enemy is like, you might even have a "nest" of aerial drones that range out from a building like this. Making it a great target for a mission or two. What's it like in the Dream?

Take a look at the high rises near you and think about how they might play a role in the World After Bliss. Let me know what you come up with!