Ask yourself why you think you need a prologue to provide context. Is it because you’re worried that your reader won’t know about the country’s war-torn background? Are you worried that when you start mentioning the Qwigle Glyphs your reader will be confused? Because truthfully, most readers do really well picking up context as they go.

If your story is set in a famished countryside, but you don’t open on a scene in which it makes sense to mention the famine, then you can wait to reveal that information until it makes sense. If your character is scrawny and stealing bread, we don’t need to know immediately that it’s because of the famine. Readers will know there’s a reason, that they’re probably hungry, and as we pull out, we’ll realize it’s not just the protagonist who’s hungry, but the whole country. And we’ll be plenty happy to wait a few pages to get that context.

If it’s a fantasy word dilemma, just don’t worry about it. If the Qwigle Glyphs are not glyphs at all, but a race of elves, we’ll figure that out without a prologue. And if there are so many fantasy words that it’ll be confusing without a prologue to define each word, then there’s too much confusion to begin with, prologue or not.

Also, most readers don’t need or want a lengthy history of your world or characters. Histories are boring because we don’t yet have reason to care about the intricacies of your guild system, and concepts alone aren’t enough to pull readers in. Readers start wanting to know more once they feel at home in a world, and dropping somebody in with no character to guide them and no plot to push them forward isn’t going to cultivate that interest.