“Warning, approaching vessel: this planet is quarantined and has been declared perditionem in aeternum by order of the Office of the Praefectrix, the Holy Askelline Synod, and the Ordos Askelline. You are entering a nominated exclusion zone and will be fired upon by vessels of Battlefleet Askellon if you continue on your current course. Turn about, say again, turn about...Warning, approaching vessel: this planet is quarantined... “
–Automated warning signal from Kul Exclusion Zone Orbital XVIII
Kul is an arid, empty desert world, haunted by sandstorms and dust devils that skitter across its crumbling surface. The planet is covered in rough sandstone; the deserted ruins of moderately sized frontier settlements and ghost towns dot its surface unevenly, their streets empty of all save the winds and the merciless light of Kul’s white-gold star. Kul idles at the end of a winding, fading cul-de-sac Warp route that branches away from a score of uninhabited systems. In the ordinary course of events, the world would have been left to its own devices, allowed to stagnate, been forgotten. However, in light of its tragic, eldritch, and horrific history, Kul has been soberly appraised as a "clear and present danger to the moral and spiritual well-being of the entire sector".
As such, Kul has been quarantined and blockaded, locked away from the ordinary starfarers of the region by a number of orbiting defence platforms and the attentions of a small and increasingly strained Battlefleet Askellon taskforce. Now, the attentions of the sector’s most opportunistic recidivists turn to the dead world like moths to a flame by persistent rumours of Warp-flotsam of incalculable value. These greediest and most rapacious practitioners of the Faceless Trade thoughtlessly dice not only with their own souls but with the souls of countless others across Askellon, for the taint that settled upon and destroyed Kul may yet claim other worlds.