From publisher blurb:
Cold As Clay is a ‘zine size book for 5e and 5.5e about ghosts and hauntings amidst the plunging temperatures of a supernatural blizzard. The demonic entity called the Empty is a maelstrom of restless spirits and freezing snows, commanding the allegiance of spirits from motes of ghostly light drifting through moonbeams to frigid incorporeal demons that hunt down the living to snuff them out with their deadly freezing temperatures.
While the freezing temperatures of the haunting can eventually become so frigid and so all-pervasive as to inflict actual cold damage, the vast majority of the Empty’s attacks are made to the psyche. The stress and sanity system from previous books returns, further fleshed out with a full nine different sanity tracks along with a roster of wraiths who primarily deal stress damage. What kind of psychological breakdown does your character suffer when pushed past their limits? Do they become obsessed with some delusional plan which, they are convinced, will solve all their problems despite a tenuous connection to them, monomaniacally trying to contact some alleged ally or conjure some alleged benevolent spirit? Do they become irritable and violent, lashing out at friend and foe alike? Do they become paranoid about their friends’ survival, unwilling to let companions out of their sight, even for a moment?
Or do they give in to the demonic possession of the Empty, becoming despondent, exhausted with the struggle to preserve their own lives under the siege of the wraiths, and seek to just get it over with - to walk out into the blizzard and be consumed?
Ghosts are immune to physical damage, and while you can kill them with fire or lightning, this tends to be Hell on property values and people would generally rather you lay the spirit to rest, especially since this often involves solving the ghost’s murder. Skilled in picking up clues from ambient ghosts, the Ghost Hunter subclass for the Rogue is purpose-built to lay ghosts to rest and also makes for an effective private investigator in general - anyone whose played investigative games before knows that breaking and entering is a valuable skill, especially if your investigation isn’t backed by the state. You can also attach the Ghost Hunter subclass to the new Agent class, which is a skill monkey with a sneak attack that is almost exactly like the SRD Rogue except with skill tricks, pairs of special abilities attached to each skill you have expertise in, where using one of the pair will also consume the other. It’s got all the core features of the Rogue and the same subclass breakpoints, so any Rogue subclass will work with it, while also having more interesting features like the skill tricks.
And you can also use ouija boards and other means of contacting the departed to glean information, but don’t push your luck with them too far. Interrogating ghosts is a bit of a game of Blackjack, ask too many questions and the next morning the housekeepers will discover, with a shriek, your frostbitten corpse shriveled up in front of your ritual implements.
Contact the echoes of the departed. Bring peace to their departed souls and closure to their grieving family. But do it quickly, or it’s you who’ll be cold as clay.