Archibald and his boys shoot to wound, not kill, and attack from ambush to take caravans. Jehanna mercenaries are nothing if they don't know they're being attacked. As for Jehanna attacking? Archibald feels no loyalty to who owns the land. If it gets taken over by Jehanna, he's fine with it as long as they are just and honourable, like Rioga. Any caravans to the Emperor himself are not attacked, both because they are more well guarded and because Archibald holds respect for him. The raiding he has to put a stop to, and is rapidly degrading his opinion of Jehanna though (I mean, if you can't control your troops, what kind of leader are you), so he could very easily be turned loose against Jehannan forces. You just have to know what to say to him. 

The plausible story of the corpulent lord would be, rather than a lord, he is a regent acting in the place of a lord. The previous one died of old age, leaving his young son to manage to land. Still unprepared to do this, the lordling hired a regent to do the management for him...only this man essentially locked the true lord away in the study and did corrupt things in his name, acting as a malevolent force. Seeing as he was now the head of all administration, he could send out false reports and the actual lord knew nothing about what was happening. Being a lonely county up in the north west, surrounded by barren mountains I figured Rioga wouldn't exactly have muich time to find out about false reports.

Grado itself isn't a bad place as long as the Emperor knows you're there, but when you're a small outlying village with few fertile lands and barely ekeing out a living it can get pretty bad when an earthquake messes you up. The place isn't even visited by traders all that much seeing as its so out of the way and mostly poor so apart from the false reports filed by Lord Fattarse, theres not much information coming out of that region. I don't know if I made it sound like a regular thing though, I tried to limit it to only that area. And don't worry about other corrupt lords. Thsi guy isn't even a lord, only a regent (Maybe even from another nation)

As for joining I'd think he'd just be a neutral character against the bandits trying to escape the fight by getting to one of the stairways in the top left of the map. You really just need someone to convince him to join (Who is not a Lord) by cementing evidence of Jehannan misconduct. He's already teetering on the brink so it shouldn't take much. Other than that, allied forced may try to detain him since he just finished stealing from the pantry with his two bandit buddies. With placement, I'd think just running from the empty passageway in the top right to the top left stairway, fighting Jehannans as he goes.

After being recruited, he'll hand over the reins of his Merry Band to his Lieutenant who will run operations in his absence, until he returns. Oh, and I can make those trading cards for you, and even give you two styles to choose from.

Clean:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/sh6fXum.png[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/W5HAiji.png[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/FP1RBZx.png[/img]

Fancy:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/70r0ipB.png[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/2xGvFcJ.png[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/Nomcpce.png[/img]