About The Prosopaedia

[Runeblogger]

I've published this about The Prosopaedia:
https://elruneblog.blogspot.com/2024/09/cults-of-runequest-prosopaedia-what-is.html

Maybe you'll agree, maybe not. 🙂

[mfbrandi]

I may be wrong (as I so often am), but I have a feeling that rather than having made the word up, Stafford owned a book that described itself as a “prosopædia” and liked the word and idea so much that he used it in the RQ3 GoG box. There must be photos? Someone will know! — @scott-martin? If not, chalk it up as another episode from my hallucinated life.

[Jason Farrell]

Even though it's a reference book with little directly gameable material, I think it's my favorite of the Cults line so far.  I haven't read "The Lunar Way" yet, so that might change, but I don't think so.

The Prosepedia is the least problematic book, in my opinion.  It's the best at accomplishing what it sets out to do.  I'm frequently disappointed by what I see as a lack of effort on Chaosium's part.  The Lightbringers and Earth Goddesses books are both depressingly cut and paste, with not nearly enough attention given to some of the "lesser" cults (you can't fit much in a 3-5 page writeup, especially when a big chunk of it is just repetitive template based stuff).  And the Mythology book is just material mostly cobbled together from the Sourcebook and the Guide. 

The Prosepedia, on the other hand, is a reasonably comprehensive realization of its purpose.  It seems to have a lower typo to page ratio than other books, as well, which is nice.  It's beautifully illustrated, but that's more par for the course for the line as a whole. 

[RandomNumber]

The Prosopaedia is an essential reference for the GM, IMO.  My group is more motivated by the RQ system than Glorantha so we just need the minimum amount of lore to game - the Prosopaedia delivers that beautifully. In some respects, Weapons & Equipment is the best lore book so far - it really brings the day-to-day, rather than the divine and mythological, to life.

Edited September 25 by RandomNumber

[scott-martin]

On 9/24/2024 at 5:12 PM, mfbrandi said:

chalk it up as another episode

I'm going to blur the thought here with my thumb and speculate about the specific dream books he might've wished he was modeling. "Mask" (μάσκες) has taken over even in modern Greek so the line to a Campbell in-joke is a little obscure unless we're dealing with autodidacts trying to reconstruct something which we don't have, which we are. Greg was fine with "mask" in religious contexts as we know from archaic survivals like the Red School Of Masks . . . but when we surrender the mask for the prosopon we give up all kinds of ancient connotations that revolve more around veils (concealment, revelation, all that Heidegger stuff) and ultimately knotwork, webs of Arachne Solara holding the world together.

Reaching for a suitably classical term might have taken him to "larva," which revolved more around the world of ghosts and was probably rejected (if even contemplated in the first place) because of the modern association with bug babies, entomology is where etymology goes to die. A larvopaedia would have been at best a book of death masks, abandoned shells like in the kabala. (I was just refreshing my search for issues of a zine Greg worked with that had a kabalistic edge to it, but this is a digression further into what-might-have-been-but-probably-wasn't.)

The line of προσώπων goes through the great Norman O Brown's Love's Body (1966), which had endless cheap paperbacks circulating in the Red Box Era. Brown's ultimate launching point was a thread in Leviathan leading through the differently great Erving Goffman in pursuit of the performative aspect of personality, the character sheet at the heart of the maze.

In my dream the original "Book of Masks" or "Mask Encyclopedia" is a garbled take on the thrice-great Frank Waters' Masked Gods (1950) and so would have been a dictionary of iconography . . . signs by which you can recognize each of the Gloranthan entities as they intrude on your life. And since the παιδιά actually means "children," this "school" of masks might actually be read as "The Masks of Children," or a compendium of faces to try on for an American halloween. When these faces are discarded they become abandoned shells, dry larvae blowing like the character sheets dead people leave behind.

This in itself is more ποεδία than παιδεία, less of a school or a big authoritative book than a kind of extended hallucination in what we call life. But IMG the secret of Moonbroth hidden in plain sight all this time is that it's a kind of pueblo, a massive interconnected labyrinth of rooms and passages with most of its real life underground. So that's nice!