Subclass Sorcerer Frost Sorcery
The Frost Sorcery is a Sorcerer subclass with Cold as its elemental identity. Create Ice at Level 3 lets you generate icy difficult terrain as a Bonus Action, optionally spending Sorcery Points to expand the coverage. Frost Spells provides an always-prepared list of Cold and control spells. Frozen Body increases your Hit Points by Sorcerer level and reduces movement cost on ice. Cold-Hearted at Level 6 adds Charisma modifier to Cold spell damage, reduces Large or smaller creatures' Speed on hits, and grants Cold Resistance.
| LEVEL | FEATURE |
|---|---|
| 3 | Create Ice, Frost Spells, Frozen Body |
| 6 | Cold-Hearted |
Create Ice You can take a Bonus Action to magically create icy terrain on up to five spaces. The ice-covered spaces become Difficult Terrain and remain until the end of your next turn. When you take this Bonus Action, you may spend one or more Sorcery Points to freeze an additional five spaces for each Sorcery Point spent.
Frost Spells When you reach certain Sorcerer levels, you always have the listed spells prepared.
Level 3: Blindness/Deafness, Ice Knife, Misty Step, Sleep
Level 5: Sleet Storm, Slow
Level 7: Fire Shield, Ice Storm
Level 9: Cone of Cold, Conjure Elemental
Frozen Body Your skin takes on a faintly ice-like, crystalline glow. Your Hit Point maximum increases by 3, and it increases by 1 whenever you gain another Sorcerer level. In addition, Difficult Terrain composed of ice or snow doesn't cost you extra movement, and when you walk on ice, you only spend 1 foot of movement for every 2 feet you move.
Cold-Hearted When you deal Cold damage to a Large or smaller creature with a spell, you can attempt to freeze it in place — that creature's Speed is reduced by 15 feet. When you deal Cold damage with a spell, you add your Charisma modifier to the damage. You have Resistance to Cold damage.
The Frost Sorcery is the Cold damage identity + battlefield control Sorcerer subclass. Create Ice + Cold-Hearted creates a terrain-control loop: use Create Ice to generate Difficult Terrain in a 5-space area (Bonus Action), then cast Cold spells into that area to slow enemies further. A creature moving through ice Difficult Terrain already moves at half speed; if also slowed by Cold-Hearted (−15 ft Speed), most melee enemies become unable to close distance in a single turn.
Frozen Body's HP increase (3 + 1 per Sorcerer level = 11 bonus HP at Level 9) gives the Frost Sorcerer the highest HP of any Sorcerer subclass — meaningful for a d6 hit die class.
Cold-Hearted's Charisma modifier addition to Cold damage applies to all Cold spells: Cone of Cold (8d8 base), Ice Storm, Ray of Frost. At 20 Charisma (+5), every Cold spell gets +5 damage per instance.
The Frost Spells list covers multiple roles:
- Control: Slow, Sleet Storm, Ice Storm
- Burst damage: Cone of Cold, Ice Knife
- Mobility: Misty Step
- Sustained combat: Fire Shield (reflecting damage to melee attackers)