Ok... sorry if you guys get tired of hearing me agonize over crap. You should be glad that I actually don't post most of what I go over myself.
Anyway... here are the three paths that I'm looking at:
Master of NineCl. Cleric 1/Crusader 4/Warblade 1/Cobra-strike Monk 1/Mo9 5
Domains: Time and Darkness (free Blind Fight and Improved Initiative)
Feats: IUS & Dodge (monk), Adapative Style (retrain Stone Power to this), other feats unchanged.
Gain: LOTS of known and granted manuevers at levels 8-12, several stances, and end up with IL 10 for Crusader and 9 for Warblade at 12th, and also all the other goodies of the Mo9 like Dual Stance.
Lose: Earth and Animal Devotion, Stone Power (usefulness becomes marginal as levels increase, anyway, but Adaptive Style is complete shit...). This will also use up almost ALL of my skill points on mostly useless crap, but... Flumph isn't exactly a skill-based character, anyway. I could also just dump charisma, since I won't be using Turning to fuel devotion feats, which is actually a plus...
Wow... the skill reqs are brutal for this... It would be very nice to use Hide as one of the 4 skills I get to 10 ranks, since Mongrelfolk get a +4 racial bonus to it, but doing it without going Swordsage instead of Warblade is going to be pretty much impossible... And my BAB is going to suck unholy balls if I go with Swordsage. it will be pretty bad even with the warblade, of course (+8 at 12th....).
Ruby Knight VindicatorCl. Cleric 1/Crusader 3/Warblade 1/RKV 7
Feats same, but I need to get 4 ranks in Hide somehow. I could just cross-class them.
Gain: extra stance and a few extra maneuvers (only 1 extra readied), Divine Recovery, Armored Stealth and Divine Impetus late in the game. I know I will be hating myself for not actually having spellcasting to advance, though... and I don't know if this is actually better than just dipping base classes.
Other: Just dip martial classes like barbarian, monk, and fighter for bonus feats, Rage, pounce, etc, and alternate those with martial adept classes when it is advantageous. Strangely, this is not the simplest way to go... but it might be just as effective as any of the others, or more-so.
I'm leaning towards actually going for Master of Nine, but that would be a lot less painful if I could use retraining to extensively swap around things like my domains (losing the devotion feats), skill points, and feats, instead of starting out with the crappy prereq skills and feats. I might just suck it up, though.