I'm currently playing a sorcerer 5/souleater 4 who is also a vampire. Our GM encourages us seeking power, and becoming a vampire proved no easy task (it required me among other things to sing a ballad with a bard to to get a tear of a mermaid, and yes, I actually sung). Anyway, my character likes undead, and dabbles in necromancy.
I want him to be as intimidating and menacing as possible, and that means of course he has to ride a dragon.
The issue wouldn't be in money or chance of succes, it's just that I can't really find a way to obtain a somewhat permanent dragon mount in the future levels.
Even though it is some levels away, my thoughts went to the spell create undead. I'd have to kill a dragon, bring it back to life as a juju zombie (if thats possible on a non-humanoid, though I don't see why it wouldn't be), and then somehow control it.
I'm aware of the limit in HD for skeletal champions and juju zombies, but I can work around that.
I figured that I would have to control the dragon once and then decrease his intelligence and/or wisdom with multiple uses of bestow curse so that he wouldn't get other saves (or simply fail them) when the spell or effect controlling him wears off, or calls for another save.
That brings me to the controlling part.
I'm willing to dip a level in juju oracle for the command undead feat and the channel ability that comes with it, but according to the feat, that would only allow control over 1 HD / (I assume) oracle level. So unless I'm reading that wrong, that's not an option.
The control undead spell would call for a number of re-castings /day that even the most multiple use based sorcerer won't manage, and though creating an item of unlimited castings of the spell is not entirely out of the question, I'm really hoping to begin my search for a suitable dragon when I get the lower level create undead spell.
The command undead spell is an option, though the control wouldn't be complete, so I would prefer something else.
using the animate dead spell to create a zombie dragon is also possible and so far in my opinion the best option, but the zombie template causes the dragons to lose quite a few things like HP, damage and attack bonus, not to mention basically every special ability the dragon has.
So my question is this, is there any way to obtain a permanent undead dragon mount using 6th-levels spells and lower?