I looked up the New Gods on the wiki, and there wasn't much info at all. Is there anything I should know about them? It appears that their canon interaction with the Team has been circumvented, with just the one sighting-at-a-distance during the events of Old Wounds. (Unless some of it happened while Ferris was in China and didn't get mentioned?)
The New Gods are aliens with a multiple choice past.
The classic origin is that they are the the life that evolved when alien Norse Gods had Ragnarok, splitting the planet in two.
It was actually the ragnarok of the Marvel Norse gods, the writer was the Thor writer, but marvel didn't want to kill off Thor.
So if he had his druthers, Darkseid would probably have been the villain in the last Avengers movie.
They are gods, but DC doesn't use god as a power level but as racial description.
The innate powers all New Gods are supposed to have are about the same as the Amazon power set, except there are New Gods who seem to not have those supposedly innate powers.
They have been given several so called power ups to stop people from noticing how pathetic they are, but for some reason DC is generally allergic to giving them a power up that actually makes a difference.
They were made giants who could use the Earth as a golf ball, but they use technology to shrink or grow things when they come too and fro, so that doesn't actually make any freaking difference.
In Anarky, Darkseid claimed to just be an avatar of the true, omnipotent Darkseid. But since "true Darkseid" never ever interacts with anyone, again, that makes no freaking difference.
Later, DC made the New Gods conceptual beings, except, you guessed it, that is useless puffery because that and $2.70 could get them a cup of coffee.
Some New Gods have personal powers, like Lightray having light powers, but most use hypertech. The leader of Darkseid's Female Furies, as an example, has electrified metal coils she uses as a whip.
Post Flashpoint, they were actually made godlike in power, killing Lanterns left and right like it was hunting season, but it only took DC over four decades to make them powerful as a race.
Humans can become New Gods, the Source made an African American wheelchair bound Viet Nam vet into the Black Racer, and at one point the origin of the Forever People was foundlings from Earth that New Genesis adopted.
Darkseid is the go to cosmic DC villain for the same reason that Joker is the go to Batman villain, they are allergic to actually making new villains rather than reusing old villains ad nauseum.
DC has gone back and forth as to whether their planets are, in the Green Lantern storyline in which the Green Lanterns invaded Apokalips, Apokalips is in the armpit of the universe, so far away from Oa, at the center of the universe, that the green lanterns had trouble recharging their rings. Later they made the planets in a different universe.
Darkseid's MO is to gather more power. Usually by acquiring the Anti-Life Equation, but he's also tried to steal the power of Heaven, invading Olympus, draining the mojo from other super villains, highlandering gods, etc, but he's also been known to try to recruit more powerful soldiers, usually involving Kryptonians or Kryptonian like beings, like recruiting Supergirl, conquering Daxam, or producing a clone army of Doomsdays.
For this story, I believe Oblo is going with they are spiritual beings whose powers will actually have something to do with what they are the god of, and that their power level will be somewhere between the OP lantern killing gods of post flashpoint and the generally useless schmucks they were before that.
DC once made the Hyper-Adapter that Darkseid sent after Batman responsible for the Lazarus Pits and Vandal Savage's immortality, but whether Oblo will use that connection remains to be seen.
And oh yes, the New Gods worship the Source, which as the name implies, is the source of everything.
The Source chose humans as the successors of the New Gods, so humanity is the New New Gods, making New Genesis and Apokalips the Fourth World, and Earth the Fifth World.
