Minionmancy without access to undead?

[AnonymousPepper]

So I'm in a 3-man gestalt game right now (a move we took after losing one of our core players), Strange Aeons AP, and I'm running into the biggest problem with gestalt games - the action economy just isn't there.

Ordinarily, I'd just take the easy way out and animate dead myself a bloody skeleton, but it's here we run into three major problems. First and foremost, the party comp is as follows:

NG Warpriest of Smiad // Contemplative Wilder (me)
LG Paladin // Skald
TN Bard // Swashbuckler

There's a paladin in the party, so that's a no there, and as a NG character getting spells directly from a LG patron, I cannot get [evil] spells from him either so lmao. The GM refuses to budge on this matter, regardless of how nonsensical the whole [evil] tag on those spells may be. I may be able to just get a scroll of it, but that costs extra money and doesn't get around the paladin pitching a fit or the next issues.

Additionally, anyone familiar with the path knows that the Church of Pharasma has a decent bit to do with the PCs, especially early on, and I don't want to get into it with them for obvious reasons.

And lastly, you'll note that we're a very buff-heavy party, between the Skald, the Bard, and I'll eventually be picking up Prophetic Song as well. Undead being immune to mind-affecting abilities cuts out a lot of what makes us capable.

My initial thought was to get a psionic construct (in the form of an Astral Construct done with Craft Psionic Construct as I've seen suggested multiple places around here and the internet in general, such as here), but it still runs into the issue of being mindless and thus not benefiting from any of our big buffs. It also isn't great as a ranged attacker, which is the role we're most in need of, largely by virtue of, again, being mindless and thus not having any feats (and its existing menu options are all melee related).

There's always Leadership, I guess, but that also consumes money like it's going out of style, in a party that absolutely does not have the spare feats to yoink the crafting feats to negate that problem, and frankly a cohort that's stuck two levels behind the party would be kinda ineffective in the sort of game we're running (not helped by my mediocre charisma, and I would have to be the one to take it because my particular warpriest archetype - we're running the lore-agnostic Arsenal Chaplain variant - has more feats to spare than anyone else). I'm leaning towards this, but I can't help but wonder if there's something better to be had.

Any other thoughts?