I'm looking to add a few hundred pages to a DNN instance.  They will be in a certain order and grouped under specific tabs.   Each will have a name, title and description - the page content can come later.

Any one heard of/used a tool that would automate this process?

Menu, yes.  They need to work with childlinks modules

Permissions, no.  I can use copy permissions to descendants

Even better would be to apply a page template so I can to push body content forward a bit.  But, I'll take what I can get.

best would be a custom module using DNN API, but I am not aware of any.

Another option is using a SQL script, which adds the records into database tables pages, pagePermissions and pagesettings. I strongly suggest to use a local DNN installation for developing this script and ideally use a sproc performing all the actions per given page name and parent.