Gates of Gold is set in the World of Darkness version of San Francisco.  It is a place where a rising tide either lifts your boat or swamps it.  Incredible wealth sits side by side with incredible poverty.  Galleries of fine art sit next to tenemant buildings.  The city has some of the most convoluted politics and the most imaginative corruption anywhere.

Mages in San Francisco have organised themselves into a concillium which, when it was formed streched from the Golden Gate Bridge to Folsom Lake.  However, about 40 years ago, the bulk of the Free Council mages gathered in Berkely and Davis and ceceded, spliting the concilium's territory and isolating Sacramento.