Faf’s Advocacy for Isilrod
Tags: dnd speech campaign night-song
Kind: Speech (final-round advocacy) Performer: Faf D’Gnarwol Delivered: Session 11 — Old Tin Top’s, Midsommer Night’s Song, round three Subject: Isilrod Gurglestrom — after his performance of “Fake Ass Bards”
The advocacy that cemented Isilrod’s win. In the final round, each finalist’s champion argues their case before Old Tin Top (“the Muse”). Faf’s speech drew the top modifier, and Isilrod rolled near-perfect to take the whole Night Song.
Transcription
Honorable judges…
Today we heard confidence. We heard devotion. We heard promises shouted into the world and vows whispered into the darkness. One voice demanded the world listen. Another promised to follow another soul beyond death itself. Beautiful sentiments. Beautiful performances. But they were echoes.
Then Isilrod stepped forward. He did not ask us to hear another man’s story. He asked us to hear our own.
His fingers found the strings of his lute, and then something impossible happened. The instrument ceased to be merely wood and wire. Another voice rose beside it, not competing, but completing it. A melody that should not have existed. Ancient craftsmanship intertwined with something altogether new. It was as if the song itself refused to be bound by the limits of a single instrument.
And in that impossible harmony, he sang the words none of us wished to hear. Not that there are bad musicians among us. There are not. Every soul who stood upon this stage has earned respect. But there is a terrible difference between a musician and a bard. A musician can borrow another’s melody. A bard cannot borrow another’s truth.
His song was called Fake Ass Bards, but it was never about mockery. It was a lament. A mourning song for those who have forgotten that music is not measured by applause, nor by technical perfection, nor by how faithfully one repeats words already written. It is measured by the courage to stand before your peers with nothing to hide.
Every verse stripped away another disguise. Every chorus asked us whether we had mistaken performance for purpose. And every impossible harmony reminded us that true art does not imitate. It creates.
I watched this room while he sang. No one laughed because they had been told a joke. No one fell silent because they had been scolded. They fell silent because they recognized the truth. Truth has a strange magic. It makes us uncomfortable before it makes us better.
That is what a bard is for. Not to flatter kings. Not to repeat legends. Not to borrow another’s pain. A bard gives voice to the truth that everyone else was too afraid to sing.
That is what Isilrod did today. He risked being misunderstood. He risked offending those he called friends. He risked losing this very competition. Because he believed the song mattered more than the prize. And that is the purest expression of bardic tradition I have witnessed in my lifetime.
When these halls are empty… when these judges have gone home… when our names have been carved away by time… no one will remember who played the cleanest scales. They will remember the day a dwarf stood before the Symposium, laid bare his soul, and reminded us what a bard is supposed to be. Not an imitator. Not an entertainer. A truth-teller.
If music echoes through stone, then truth echoes through eternity. And I have no doubt that long after every one of us is gone, the dwarven halls will still carry the voice of Isilrod.