Coalition (WOD)

The Coalition
A common symbol used to denote Coalition affiliation, derived from the icon of the re-canonized Society of St. Leopold.
Other names	Five Torches
Nicknames	Second Inquisition
Type	Inter-org conspiracy
Founded	over the course of 2004 and 2005
Status	Active and worldwide
Leader	FIRSTLIGHT/The Entity (de facto)

The Coalition (sometimes the Five Torches) is the unofficial name (officially, it doesn’t exist) of the illicit and covert multinational conspiracy within many intelligence services and the Vatican to hunt vampires.

It is the most salient iteration and frequent "tip of the spear" of what Kindred call the Second Inquisition, to the point that many vampires use the term "Second Inquisition" interchangeably to refer to the Coalition and the vague movement accompanying it. If any concrete group or hierarchy could claim the exclusive title of "Inquisition" in the modern nights, it would be this.

Overview

Even how it describes itself oversimplifies matters: in practice, the Coalition comprises two overlapping conspiratorial alliances, a major third force, and a number of clandestine local programs that all sometimes share targeting information. What began as shorthand for a trans-national collaboration between monster-hunting orgs has since taken on its own life. "Officially" — insofar as such any participant recognizes the designation — the Coalition consists of five individual Government and Religious orgs, with a number of satellite groups and second-party allies surrounding each of them: The United States' FIRSTLIGHT, Brazil's BOES, Russia’s GRU-N58, the UK’s JTRG, and the Vatican's Society of St. Leopold.

To the Vatican this is simply a continuation of the Holy Inquisition established to burn vampirism out of Christendom eight hundred years ago. The Vatican found it needful to change that body’s name to the Holy Office, and then to the still more anodyne Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but the inquisitors’ fire, banked though it may have been for a time, never went out.

The existence of the Coalition is a clandestine secret even among the various secret services they draw from. Most of the common personnel only know of coordinated strikes against "terrorists" and similar acceptable targets. The Coalition cannot simply hijack their respective governments, declare open war, burn vampire-kind out in urban combat, and corral them into camps for two main reasons.

First, the Camarilla still holds very powerful cards within the member governments (and the Brujah likewise in Russia specifically). They command corporations, senators, newspapers, television stations, whole nations — thus, operational security requires the Coalition to keep their actions secret even from their own putative masters. The ease with which the Camarilla officially dismantled the IAO in 2003 provides a constant reminder of this.

Second, the Second Inquisition has fewer advantages than the First: it does not command the spirit of those it supposedly protects, so it cannot assuage their fears of the unnatural. Announcing an “anti-vampire crusade” in the modern night would cause global panic, and possibly the fall of one or more of the governments whose treasure and soldiers the Coalition redirects. After what is now decades of annually spending billions of taxpayer dollars (or pounds, or real, or rubles, etc.) to circumvent every human rights and war crime tribunal in existence with impunity, the Coalition is under no pretensions that, if at all possible, it must quietly do its work before disbanding, with the wider public never learning of its existence. There is no glory to be found in this line of work.

Worse, from the hunters’ viewpoint, they could not prevent foolish or self-interested interference on behalf of “undead civil rights,” “negotiating with a new species,” “the opportunities for knowledge,” or any other excuse the kine would make to remain in their comfortable slaughter pen. Even the Pope could not inform his own cardinals of the true threat — how much weaker must be the hand of a faceless bureaucrat in some lower floor of the Pentagon?

Organization

Local political pressures or turmoil keep the Coalition from full cooperation for now in Turkey, Thailand, India, Nigeria, and Mexico, although all of the countries and their own independent organizations (Such as the DAAE) nevertheless appear on FIRSTLIGHT and IAO briefing books for the rest of the 2020s.

The Coalition, especially its secular members, keep their true purpose masked behind bland committee-driven titles. When it sees the need to briefly emerge from behind its veil of no-questions-asked black box government funding at all, it masks its actual purposes behind anodyne and ever-changing walls of jargon - short-lived cabinets that are quietly shut down only for another to pop up somewhere else.

Coalition official titles over the years

• Joint Working Group on Transnational Unusual Threat Assessment (2006)
• Multilateral Liaison Committee for Counter-Terror Scenario Planning (2007/2017)
• Sub-Ministerial Level Consultation Program to Address Stochastic Crisis Events (Late 2016)
• Intergovernmental Task Force on Extraordinary Counter-Terrorist Response (2018).

Members/Allegiances

Bureaucracy and familiarity have increased the Coalition's collective effectiveness, but blunted their focus. National interest and personal political ambitions often overshadow their zeal to quash the vampire threat. The Coalition has become a nest of overlapping conspiracies each with their own agendas, paranoias, and rivalries. It is the role of the IAO, FIRSTLIGHT, and the Vatican’s La Entità to keep everyone on board and focused on the conspiracy’s long-term goals when planning operations. This informal executive committee steers operational planning by dint of IAO’s bottomless purse, FIRSTLIGHTs command and control, and La Entità’s near monopoly on mystical countermeasures.

Since its "flagship" operation against the Vienna Chantry in 2008, the Coalition has gradually begun to fragment into a trio of "cliques", each of whom view the business of purging the world of vampire control (as orgs are wont to do) as a means to their own personal end. With each passing day, the rifts between these groups grow wider as the pretense of alliance grows flimsier, and the higher-ups of each fear that the Coalition as a unified entity may not survive long enough to conclusively say that the world's blankbody problem has been resolved.

US/UK Axis

The most "patriotic" angle of the Five Torches, the American and British wings of the Coalition (with additional allies in most of the second-party members, especially Bureau IX) are the most flagrant about the fact that the Second Inquisition is merely an excuse to carry out their real goals (though they would still never say it outright). Though most of their manpower and attention does still go to hunting down and destroying blankbodies, FIRSTLIGHT and its closest allies still take several opportunities to use their deniable assets, impenetrable veil of secrecy, mystical aid and complete lack of accountability to silence mundane threats to the dominance of NATO in general, but mostly America specifically.

• FIRSTLIGHT (USA)
  • FBI Special Affairs Division
  • Information Awareness Office
• Newburgh Group (UK)
  • Joint Threat Response Group
  • Specialist Operations Branch 13

Vatican Loyalists

Those members of the Coalition who place their (almost exclusively Catholic) faith over matters of geopolitics, this axis of the Five Torches is the closest to being genuinely focused on its stated goals. That said, of course, it still has a notably vested interest in greatly expanding the international reach of the Catholic Church - if not culturally, then certainly politically. The first Inquisition was by and large contained to Western Christendom, but the Second is a worldwide phenomenon, and it has very little interest in adapting itself to suit these new foreign theaters.

• Entity (Vatican)
  • Society of St. Leopold
  • Entity Special Operations Group/Gladius Dei
• Secret Special Operations Battalion (Brazil)
  • Military Police Extraterritorial Operations (albeit only partially affiliated with the BOES out of which it emerged)

GRU

Although similar to the US/UK axis in the sense that it seeks to further the interests of the broader Russian state over any kind of altruistic defense of humanity, the orgs contained within and subordinate to Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) remain separate from that lobe of the Coalition due to its distrust of NATO, its member nations, and the orgs in those countries' employ. Their role within the Coalition is often to temper operational overreach, but the Russians devote a rather considerable amount of time and resources undermining the Vatican loyalists' confidence in the US and UK.

• GRU Direction 58
  • Akritai
  • Spetsnaz Unit 242

Second- and Third-party Members

Since the start of the 2010s, the Coalition has expanded beyond its initial five core members. In addition to the three other ECHELON countries partnered with FIRSTLIGHT and the Newburgh Group, as of 2022, six more nations have provided enough intelligence or muscle to count as “second-party partners” and get seats at the table during operational planning sessions.

• Bureau IX (Poland) (usually aligned with US/UK against Russia)
• La Calcédoine (France)
• G-Kontoret (Sweden)
• Homeland Special Program (Egypt) (frequently collaborates with Unit 8211)
• Third Intelligence Department (Japan)
• Unit 8211 (Israel)

Gallery

References

• VTM: Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition
• VTM: Camarilla
• VTM: Second Inquisition
• HTR: Hunter: The Reckoning 5th Edition