The mythologies of many human cultures seem to feature a group of recurring characters, not just recurring roles or archtypes but actual people. Whether those people are real gods, manifestations of some supernatural phenomena or just a bunch of reincarnating superpowered immortals is an open question. While newbies tend to call these beings “gods”, the wiser amongst them prefer to refer to themselves as The Twelve. Other names less commonly used are The Pantheon (trite) and The First Generation, alluding to these being perhaps the first generation of humanity, or of intelligent life on the planet.

There probably aren't exactly twelve of these people, although there can't be many more than a dozen; they have existed for so long that they regard each other as brothers or sisters, although they have taken on all the other possible family roles (each one of them has probably been parent, sibling, child or lover to any of the others at one time). Each of them has a pretty constant personality, and their gender is a consistent aspect of that personality. The male-to-female ratio appears to be about even.

The Twelve reincarnate in human avatars, and grow to adulthood unaware of their true identity, at least until they are “tapped”. We don't know how a new avatar is usually “tapped” - both avatars seen so far in the game have been tapped by Paul Jordan, whose powers appear to derive from a different group, the shadowy alien The Watchmen.