Oh, another thing about WoD that didn't work for my GMing style. Being set in the modern area, based on real-world locations was actually a lot more work for me than inventing an entire fantasy location out of whole cloth. I guess its my obsessive nature, but I went down a huge rabbit hole of researching city maps, history, occult history and lore, etc. I actually enjoyed that but it just wasn't sustainable time-wise.
White Wolf has some very good city books, although most are, unfortunately, in the Vampire line. There are a few crossover chronicles, like Dark Alliance: Vancouver. Really, what I did to solve this problem was I made a fictional city that was based on ones I knew pretty well, so I could fill it with history and locations, but nobody could call me out on my lack of research.
Also, and this is important, the World of Darkness is
like our world, but is not our world. There are going to be discrepancies- we didn't have a Week of Nightmares, for example.
Having said that, I'm a fantasy gamer at heart, so while there are advantages to a "modern" setting, sometimes I want castles and knights. White Wolf has several historical sub-settings, such as Dark Ages: Vampire, The Sorcerer's Crusade, Werewolf: The Old West, and Victorian Age: Vampire. You can just as easily run the game in any of these eras, or at the dawn of history!
As the Dark Ages books point out, dragons and other monsters used to be more common in the past, but as humans stopped believing in them, they basically all vanished. So the sky is the limit here (except not, because the God-Machine chronicle has a snippet about vampires having been ancient space travelers!).
Now that all having been said, the main reason, obviously, to buy into the World of Darkness is it's lore. So I can understand not wanting to go nuts. But you can!
As for Mage...man. I bought a ton of Mage books because I thought the setting was so cool. It really evokes movies like Dark City and The Matrix! But it turned out to be hard for my play group to grok, and then there's how magic works for the Awakened. Think of anything you want to do! Then the Storyteller decides if you have the right Spheres at the right levels, you roll a tiny die pool of Arete at a really high diff, and if you succeed, hey magic! Of course, if you botch, and maybe you didn't rationalize your "magic" away correctly and a normal human saw you ("weather baloons? swamp gas? come on now!") you accrue Paradox.
Enough of that, and you might as well dust off the old Wild Magic Surge Results tables from 2e...
