I made this cabinet with tapered coopered doors.
The doors started off polygonal with flat staves that were planed round.
To work out the angles of the mitres on the staves I drew a template of the top edge of the doors and the bottom edge of the doors as circles around the same centre. I then drew radius lines to match the width of the stock I was using at the widest point, ie. the larger circle. Additional circles were drawn in to show the thickness of the stock. That gave me a plan view of the top and bottom of each stave.
I then took each stave and on an angled shooting board shot the ends so that they were parallel to each other and at the correct angle to the vertical.
I then transfered the radius lines from my template to the ends of my timber and this gave me the mitre for the top and bottom ends of each stave. I then joined the them up along the length of the timber and that determined the compound angle of the stave edge.
In your case for an octagon the radius lines will be 45deg apart. and much easier to draw out as you want to keep the octagon. The amount of taper you want can be determined by drawing it out to scale and measuring it or by using a bit of school trigonometry. Then you can do as I did above to mark out the compound angles of each piece.
Doh! Just re read your post. You want a solid leg not a hollow one!
Get a squared length of timber stock a bit bigger then your required leg and a couple or so inches longer.
Make a template of the larger octagon with a centre hole and pin it to one end of the leg.
Make a centre hole at the other end of the leg.
Make a long, open top box to hold the leg on its centred ends so that it can spin in the box. The centres can be dowel, pointed bolts, screws etc.
The ends of the leg must be at the correct height from the open face of the box for the taper.
Make a slot in a flat board to allow a router to cut through it.
Mount the board over the box so that the router can cut away the leg to make one of the flat sides of the octagon the length of the leg.
Make sure that one end of the slot is able to rest on the octagon template on the end of the leg to index the leg for each face.
Rout out one face, remove or lift one end of the board and rotate the leg to the next flat, replace the board and rout again.
The end of the leg where then template is may not get fully routed but can be either sawn off or finished by hand to the template.
The template can be over size so that the end inch of the leg can be cut off leaving it the correct size.
If that isn't clear enough I will draw pictures tomorrow night (if I am awake enough)