I am DM'n a campaign and am just wingin it as the groups personal goals grow. I have come to a point where an evil nemesis would be great and the group even helped pick indirectly what it would be. I'm looking to make a Black Dragon Necromancer. I'm using the Ancient Black Dragon in the Bestiary 1 as a basis. As I am unfamiliar with Pathfinder and am reading everything I can find, with no success, I am trying to find what methods to use to build a necromancy loving black dragon and be rules balanced in the end. Maybe I hope too much. But anyone who knows or has a balanced idea to make this powerful nemesis capable of existing, please, teach me.
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The best suggestion would be to rearrange some of the dragons spells and feats. The dragon in the Bestiary is a sample version and not what all dragons are. Try grabbing a more necromancy spell and possible Spell Focus (necromancy) as a feat rather than combat expertise or Vital strike. This would represent the dragon training more in vile magic than advanced melee combat.
Here are are some suggestions on spells:
Level 5: drop cone of cold for something like suffocation of feast on fear
Level 4: trade out Arcane Eye for Enervation and black tentacles for Animate dead
Level 3: Heroism for Hydrophobia (black dragons live in a swamp so water should be common
Level 2: Summon swarm traded for Blindness and deafness
FEATS:
trade out alertness and combat expertise for spell focus and greater spell focus in necromancy.
Have him/her start out with a few enervations to lover saves then start blinding and suffocating.The dragon should use his 18 intelligence to fight smart, fly above melees, target anyone with a holy symbol being waved around (as divines can deal with necromancy better than other casters) if it sees an annoying archer have him flyby and disarm/sunder the bow. Assuming the players have played for a while by the time you fight a CR 16 dragon they should be prepared for it to break their stuff or use death effects like suffocation, even still it offers a few rounds before they drop dead.
If you are willing to start altering actual stats then swap its constitution for its charisma so its a bit more frail (by dragon standards) but can cast more powerful spell but that is actually altering his ability scores which may be too far.
Hope this helps.
Other than switching some spells and feats around, you can add sorcerer levels (see Adding Class Levels in the monster advancement rules), which stack with the dragon's native spellcasting for spells known/spells per day (although not for bloodline abilities). The undead bloodline is an obvious choice; although accursed, arcane, shadow, and starsoul/void-touched can also work, depending on how much emphasis you want on negative energy/undead.
Alternately (or in addition to sorcerer levels), the dragon could take levels in shadowdancer (with some shifting of skill ranks and feats to qualify).
The Skeleton Summoner feat may be worth looking at for "instant undead," as well as the normal undead creation spells.