Turing a Crab into a Dragon, or how to make a blue eyes white jet

[Jervis]

Yeah you read that title. I’m making a very stupid character build, Seto Kaiba from Yugioh, and I’ve got everything from the monster summoning to forcing people to play a childrens card game but i’m missing one thing, the blue eyes white jet. I need a way to ride around inside of a mechanical flying white dragon. The first and easiest answer is to make a white dragon effigy, which is close to finishing it, but you can’t ride inside of it. The closest you can get without some fusion spells is a Howdah from A&EG. I’ve been working on fixing this for a long time until I stumbled on a possible solution. The siege crab has a sealed compartment in its belly. So a effigy of one of those makes for a very effective walking fortress, though only for 4 creatures. But that raises the question, how do you turn a crab into a dragon?

The only thing I could find other than Polymorphing, which leaves it as a dragon with no cockpit, is to apply templates to the crap before making a effigy of it. The only thing I’ve though of is template stacking ending in half white dragon. So you go air elemental creature, some other +dex template winged (I don’t believe it keeps the 100 foot perfect after conversion), half white dragon. You have something similar to a white dragon with a good fly speed and a cockpit to fly in. You still have a 4 clawed crab unfortunately though but this is as close as I’ve found. Does anyone have some better ways to make this?

[Spore]

Craft Construct with very generous rulings on the DM's part?

[Metastachydium]

Demented idea: did you consider something like an old white zombie dragonDrac? It has roughly the same HD and CR as a siege crab, it is huge, it is white, it is a dragon, it can fly (granted, not very well maneuverabilty-wise, but still), it's quite beefy and a corpse only needs to be mostly intact to animate. Heck, the template's fluff explicitly mentions holes on it, so a hatch to enter and little windows to see out of the "cockpit" might be available by default.

[ShurikVch]

One possibility is to stretch the Vehicle Augmentations - from Arms and Equipment Guide - to Construct; among those are the Passenger Spaces, Passenger Spaces, Fancy, and Passenger Spaces, Luxury

Another possibility is a small mobile fast-flying stronghold (built by the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook rules) in the shape of a dragon

[Jack_Simth]

One possibility is to stretch the Vehicle Augmentations - from Arms and Equipment Guide - to Construct; among those are the Passenger Spaces, Passenger Spaces, Fancy, and Passenger Spaces, Luxury

Another possibility is a small mobile fast-flying stronghold (built by the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook rules) in the shape of a dragon

Setting aside teleportation, the fastest those get is 10 mph. Faster than most folks walk, but not as fast as some folks can run.

[Gruftzwerg]

Imho the best option here are Animated Objects since those can have any shape you want (including space for passengers inside if you want).

If you want an entire build around Animated Objects, have a look at my G.R.8 & his Shadow (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24938996&postcount=113) build from a past Iron Chef contest.
It's a Warforged Tattooed Monk build who has an "Alter Self" Tattoo (with duration measured in h/classlvl and amount of tattoo x uses/day) to change into Animated Objects. G.R.8 can turn into a huge sized Animated Object and thus has space to mount up to 4 passengers (or one rider and 3 passengers). If you wanted to have some super giant robot as mount for your entire party, here you go.

[Jervis]

One possibility is to stretch the Vehicle Augmentations - from Arms and Equipment Guide - to Construct; among those are the Passenger Spaces, Passenger Spaces, Fancy, and Passenger Spaces, Luxury

Another possibility is a small mobile fast-flying stronghold (built by the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook rules) in the shape of a dragon

I really need to look into those. I think I read those at some point but I can’t remember the specifics. I think I for some reason settled on refluffing a Howdah at the time but those are probably a lot easier to use. I also though about combining a construct with a folding boat item using magic item combining rules but I highly doubt that works

[Telonius]

If this doesn't eventually encounter a Juvenile Dragon in a giant-sized Apparatus of Kwalish, it will be a horrible wasted opportunity.

[Jervis]

If this doesn't eventually encounter a Juvenile Dragon in a giant-sized Apparatus of Kwalish, it will be a horrible wasted opportunity.

Note to self, make Kaiba a Crab clan human

[Spore]

Note to self, make Kaiba a Crab clan human

Everything according to kani.

(Translator's Note: Kani means crab.)