Yeah I am on the fence, at level this thing is very powerful but its not going to scale well and starting your arcane class at level 9+ means it is going to really suck, even though it has some amazing mental stats its going to be hard to utilize them. Going Ur-Priest is probably one of the only options for this thing to not be completely useless. But as far as LA I am on the fence, it is pretty nasty at level 9 a lot of those SLAs a standard caster is only getting at level 9 ish and create undead you are getting early access to but you also only have 9 spells that can be cast a total of 18 times a day and over a third of them aren't combat spells. The Gaze and the aura are nasty passive weapons but they are nasty to everyone and you really need a team designed to cope with them so they are a mixed bag.

All and all I am floating between +0 and +1, I think I will go with +1 LA though I am open to changing that.

Quote Originally Posted by Morphic tide View Post
I'm kind of wondering what would be a sensible 21+RHD monster in a more normal CR range, to be perfectly honest. This is actually a pretty good starting point for such an exercise, given the innate no-cost (Ex) Flight and health recovery, right alongside ability score concentration and passive SR. The issue it faces in turning it into a PC is that the only scaling here is save DCs and Unholy Grace, and Undead RHD are extremely bad.
Take a look at the high level outsiders from MM most of them are quite powerful for their RHD and are a good baseline for what type of abilities a monster should have to be appropriate for its ECL.