According to legend, "Snope’s World was originally a beautiful world of pristine, flower-filled forests and glittering emerald seas teeming with life. Strangely, it was also one of the few worlds left uninhabited during the sector’s founding, though it is believed that the first sector lords were aware of both its presence and splendour prior to its disappearance into the maelstrom many millennia ago. The man credited with its discovery is Lord Drazitine, fourth scion of the Hadaeko Trader Dynasty, and heir to that failing legacy. Drazitine’s fortune had been in perpetual decline since the loss of a frigate that passed through the tumultuous wake of a dying star during Warp transit. Legend says that the insane and anguished wails of the doomed vessel’s occupants, including those of his wife and sole heir, echoed from every vox on his flagship as he helplessly watched the Immaterium swallow the vessel.
Believing that luck and the Emperor had forsaken him, Drazitine sank into despair, his fortune wasting away as his ships aimlessly plied the void. Then one night, as the grief-stricken lord stared out an observation blister into the riotous confusion of the Sea of Souls, a figure swathed in pious robes of shimmering starlight appeared before him, revealing to him a virgin world that would forever secure his family’s legacy. Though Drazitine never explicitly revealed the figure’s name, Askellian scholars believe it to have been Saint Coronia the Iridescent, and have subsequently added this apparition to her other miraculous deeds."
The saga of Drazitine’s epic voyage has since passed into myth and legend, and after years of trials, tribulations, and catastrophes, the remains of his battered convoy finally arrived within the distant Askellon Sector. Upon re-emergence into realspace, the great storm Pandaemonium "inexplicably" parted before the weary vessels, thus granting passage to a region of space that had hitherto remained unexplored for millennia. Afterwards, the fleet soon discovered an emerald globe in orbit around a bright and vigorous star, and Drazitine’s ships quickly took up high anchor as the Rogue Trader himself led the first shuttles down to its idyllic surface.
Following this discovery, the great technological leviathans of the Imperium quickly arrived to strip Snope’s World of its mineral resources, and centuries of mining eventually replaced the verdant jungles with chemical bogs and squalid swamps. Meanwhile, massive trawlers, each the size of a small city, dredged the river beds and tropical coasts for rare silicates, or probed the ocean depths in order to plunder the vast reserves of raw promethium waiting beneath the waves. Most of the indigenous species did not survive, their teeming multitudes replaced with unnatural mutations and hardy predators better able to endure the resulting pollution and deadly acid rain. After centuries of unchecked exploitation, though, the planet’s resources have begun to decline, and with them the legacy that Drazitine had bequeathed to his successors.