The del-korm culture sounds a lot like the tarken one, actually, in the sense that they feel an urgency to do as much with their lives as they possibly can, and more specifically with the tarken outcast, the [I]frehken[/I], who endeavor to become as good and accomplish as much as they can during their (very short) lives. Traditional tarken culture would have them neglect personal glory like that and live and breathe for the sake of the tarken people as a whole, though, teaching them that the individual must indeed seek glory, but must only do so for the sake of all of them, never themselves.
That aside, I'm sorry but I really need [I]more[/I], namely an explanation as to why they don't have afterlives. Even if you have a cultural reason for it (one that I do not necessarily agree with; it seems like your del-korm would have no moral compass with the way they work, meaning that their pursuit of "carving one's legacy into the fabric of time" could just as easily (or more easily, even) be accomplished by acts of cruelty as it could by acts of glory) (to say that a "treasured afterlife awaits" would probably also be a grossly mistaken assumption for any mortal dweller of the Planes to make, since if they are judged as more good than evil then yes, they will be able to go to the Upper Plane, but if not they go to the Lower Plane, which is essentially a fate that means either being eternally hunted and tormented or allowing one's self to be erased), this is a high fantasy setting which I painstalkingly designed so that almost everything has a reason for being the way they are. Mortals have afterlives, other beings don't; if the del-korm are to be [I]the only[/I] exception from this rule, there needs to be a good IC reason for that. I'm trying to be as accomodating with these new ideas as I can, but there really does need to be a mechanical justification to cram something operating on remarkably different principles than other beings into the world.

[QUOTE=Shienvien]Doesn't necessarily have to be eating the heart (as that more specifically has only been a thing due to harvesters somehow gaining more strength for it), I think; there just has to be something to stand in for the voice-consumption aspect present in his own canon. They do indeed tend to eat their dead since they believe it will give them the strength of the dead one ... and partly because they require a lot of food to sustain themselves and cannot afford waste. Er ... yeah. Would something else be more easily explainable?[/QUOTE]
I've been pondering this myself, but with the mechanics in place for this universe a true mortal creature, magic is always fueled by magical energy... and magical energy can only be increased by affecting the soul. For them to have anything akin to an ability to consume their opponents' voices to increase their own power, it would probably need to be explained as draining magical energy from them. Nothing can substitute magical energy, which makes it so difficult.

[QUOTE=Shienvien]A moral overlay that strict kind of bothers me, to be fair... And I think it [existence of seeds of good and evil] was one of the main reasons ASTA went from being unsure about afterlives to "Nope. They definitely don't have them." The same, I have simply ignored the seeds in actual character writing aside of the demonspawn and as a gimmick that determines your afterlife. Since people simply do not change in the way the seeds would suggest they should.[/QUOTE]
...I have to admit, part of me wants to take offense to that, although I'm trying hard not to let myself be bothered by it. As I pointed out further above in the post, you can't just decide that you don't like part of someone else's universe and discard it altogether like that. It's not something that is constantly relevant, no (in fact I did decide that the Seeds do not affect a being's personality unless one or both of them are missing, but are indeed solely a mechanic for determining afterlife and, in some cases, manifesting an aura of one alignment or the other in beings who exhibit exceptional growth of one of them), but they are there. It is a fundamental mechanic of the Planes.
As for the "moral overlay" being strict... Firstly, I may not have expressed myself clearly enough the first time around, so let me rephrase it: in lands where what you are doing would not be considered good or evil but it would be perceived as so by the world as a whole, the growth of the Seeds would be [I]markedly smaller[/I] than in lands that shared the tendency of the world, and in some cases local perception can completely outweigh the tendency of the world, so although one Seed may grow because of it, the other may grow more. Secondly, the lack of a moral overlay on a world-wide basis would result in the requirements for fitting into the Upper or Lower Planes would be drastically different depending on the area, meaning that one culture may be sending off their generous, selfless pacifists to Heaven while another may send off bloodthirsty sociopaths (I go into extremes here, but technically it would be possible). There needs to be some kind of [i]tendency[/I] - not a strict set of rules as enforced by religions on Earth or a particular ruleset as seen in the D&D universe, but just a general trend - to what kind of behavior will get you where... otherwise the Upper Plane wouldn't be a very nice place to be at all.

[QUOTE=Shienvien]Oh, and we were thinking Legion/ASTA could let their characters meet and do some plot, and Aemoten&co would be picking them up right before Zerul, whenever they get to that point?[/QUOTE]
Another stop on the way there?... I suppose it can be done. I just hope it'll be a short stop for once...

[QUOTE=Shienvien]Edit: Is it Jack or Nessa in the collab?[/QUOTE]
I have a feeling that I certainly could and should post, but at the same time I don't think there's anything in the way of Nessa posting, either. Whoever gets to it first does it first, I'd say.