A fan-made audiobook of Wildbow's superhero serial Ward.
Parahuman Audio turns J.C. McRae's ongoing web serial Ward into a full-cast fan audiobook, arc by arc and interlude by interlude. Volunteer narrators, original chapter music, and community editing carry a long story about damaged people with powers trying to hold a broken world together.
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Ward is a long superhero web serial by J.C. McRae, and this is the fan audiobook of it. The production comes from Parahuman Audio, the same community that made the Worm Audiobook Project. Each chapter opens with the same short credit: performed by a cast of fans and volunteers. Each one closes with a different set of names. That structure tells you most of what the show is. It follows the serial exactly, arc by arc, including interludes and epilogues, across 281 episodes. Listeners drop into Arc 15, Dying, and Arc 19, Infrared, and Arc 20, Last, which carries the story to its end. The content ranges much wider than the superhero label suggests. There are fights on a city scale, with Titans named Skadi and Ophion and Shortcut, costumes caked in grime and melted snow, buildings shifting under the strain. There are also scenes of a daughter dodging her mother's questions about a three-ingredient cheesecake recipe, and of children running through a station to reunite with a sibling. Victoria recurs across chapters. In one, she stands in front of a room explaining trigger events and how putting someone back into the mindset they had when powers arrived makes them stronger, then warns against pushing that button. It is a good example of how the serial treats power as damage rather than wish fulfilment. Another chapter drops the prose entirely and delivers itself as an email inbox: a suspended university admission, physiotherapy advice, and a message about recovered server logs and a teammate's abandoned infiltration. The production handles that format shift without flinching, which is not a small thing for volunteer audio. Crystal waits on a sidewalk without clear orders. Jacob bleeds on a rooftop and refuses to stop it. Rain and Lachlan try, awkwardly, to be decent to someone. Credits name Robert Rain Ramsey, TheVioletLegacy, Mel Teach, Tsukino Kage, Torches, and Christopher Crispy Batkin among the narrators, with music by Evan Witt. The original text can still be read and the author supported at the author's site, which the show says at the end of chapters. What holds it together is scale and patience. This is an enormous amount of unpaid work aimed at one story, made by people who clearly wanted it to exist in audio.
Made for: Readers of web serials and superhero fiction who would rather hear Ward performed than read it, and listeners who enjoy long-form character-driven fantasy with a large ensemble cast. Also suited to anyone who followed the Worm Audiobook Project and wants this one in the same form.
What sets it apart: It is a community production rather than a commercial one, with narration, editing, and music credits rotating chapter by chapter across a cast of volunteers. That rotation gives the serial's enormous ensemble genuinely different voices instead of one reader doing all of them.
From the same people who brought you the Worm Audiobook Project comes the fan-made audiobook conversion of the ongoing web serial Ward by J.C. McCrae (Wildbow)!
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Ward Audiobook gives superhero fiction weight by tracking how powers, trauma and damaged relationships persist after the immediate crisis.
Ward Audiobook turns J.C. McRae's superhero serial into narrated fiction with a large cast of characters, shifting viewpoints and powers that rarely offer simple escape from ordinary damage.
Powers come with emotional fine print; press play when that sounds better than uncomplicated heroics.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A birthday drive, a trigger lecture, and a city trying to earn its name.
Ward closes Arc 20 with a car conversation that keeps its force in small, exact details: a red wool cap over gray roots, birthday plans, cheesecake, gravy pie, and the sharp edge of a daughter being pressed about work on her own day.
Server logs and quiet emails carry more weight than any fight scene here.
Arc 20's fifth epilogue opens in a server inbox and makes routine mail do careful narrative work. The note about Niles University being suspended until new constructions gives the scene an everyday surface, while the replies to Annalace Forsyte and Victoria's longer explanation…
A rooftop reckoning that keeps its pressure in the details.
Ward starts with a rooftop standoff where Jacob, blood running from his nose, keeps talking at the edge while Kurt answers by tracking the scene: droplets, wind, the buildings in dust, and the fall itself.
Cold vigilance, awkward reunion, and a raid plan clicking into place.
Ward Audiobook's Dying - 15.a plays as a study in public composure. Crystal stands on a cold sidewalk among armed personnel and gathered civilians, back straight, while PRTCJ oversight is stretched so thin that no one is taking calls or clarifying orders.
Speculative stories, read with quiet precision.
Story-heavy actual play with sharp supernatural turns.
Local radio at reality's breaking point.
Warm table banter, strange future echoes.
A fan-produced audiobook reading of the web serial Ward by Wildbow, featuring a dramatic scene with characters Jacob and Kurt.
This episode is a fan-produced audiobook chapter of the web serial Ward, featuring a character checking emails in a post-apocalyptic superhero setting.
Ward Audiobook's "Dying – 15.a" follows Crystal at a portal station, where PRTCJ oversight is "stretched so thin" and she texts warnings as people emerge from the building.
Tattletail frames the Titans as having taken "a key piece of the puzzle" to solve "a fundamental problem in the universe."
This episode is a fan-produced audiobook chapter of the web serial Ward, featuring a character checking emails in a post-apocalyptic superhero setting.
This installment of the Ward audiobook, an Arc 20 interlude titled 'Last,' opens with Kurt and Jacob among the Slaughterhouse Nine, with King ordering twenty deaths and a citywide mutilation ultimatum to announce the group's return.
Ward Audiobook's "Last – e.2" follows Chastity as she scavenges window glass and computer equipment in an icy, partially demolished building.
Chevalier (Isaac) relives the car crash that preceded his brother Zach's abduction, hanging upside down with a seatbelt "strangling breath and blood flow." The dream shifts to his 15-year-old self, Relentless, who wears cardboard armor and breaks a gangster's knees with a baseball bat blended with an eight-foot, thirty-foot concrete drainage tube.
Victoria Dallon navigates a warped flight to Dean Stansfield’s penthouse, where garbled signs and a false evening unsettle the visit.
Presley watches Sleeper’s red glow spread over a crowded settlement while families gather indoors.
This episode is a chapter from the fan-made audiobook of the web serial Ward, featuring a battle against Titans in a superhero setting.