“Undescribed” will actually do this, though there are more sophisticated ways – there was just a thread about this!
Oh man, I love backdrops, especially once I realized you could make things – like containers, or people – part of the backdrop and open up multi-room interactions without needing to worry about manually moving stuff around.
This is a weird way, though the nice thing about it is that it’s analogous to how you write initial appearances for other objects, as you mention later – in some ways room descriptions are more like initial appearances (what you get when you type L) than descriptions (what you get when you type X THING – though of course you can’t X ROOM out of the box).
Jeez, having understand logic for just “with” or “of” seems like a really dicey design choice – I tend to do what you do, as well (though with the slash syntax, which seems easier to me for most things – “box/-- of/-- gold” or “box of/-- gold/–”.
I way way overuse this, because I learned it early and it’s easier than having to understand things like “rule for printing a paragraph about”. Actual description of a hat rack in my first game:
“This wooden number sports a profusion of hats – [if the silly floppy tam is undescribed and the crown of laurels is undescribed and the ear warmers are described]among the swarm, a silly, floppy tam and a crown of laurels catch your eye[end if][if the silly floppy tam is undescribed and the crown of laurels is described and the ear warmers are described]among the swarm, a silly, floppy tam catches your eye[end if][if the silly floppy tam is described and the crown of laurels is undescribed and the ear warmers are described]among the swarm, a crown of laurels catches your eye[end if][if the silly floppy tam is described and the crown of laurels is described and the ear warmers are described]none of the swarm of hats has much to recommend, though[end if][if the silly floppy tam is undescribed and the crown of laurels is undescribed and the ear warmers are undescribed]among the swarm, a silly, floppy tam, some ear warmers, and a crown of laurels catch your eye[end if][if the silly floppy tam is undescribed and the crown of laurels is described and the ear warmers are undescribed]among the swarm, a silly, floppy tam and some ear warmers catch your eye[end if][if the silly floppy tam is described and the crown of laurels is undescribed and the ear warmers are undescribed]among the swarm, some ear warmers and a crown of laurels catch your eye[end if][if the silly floppy tam is described and the crown of laurels is described and the ear warmers are undescribed]among the swarm, some ear warmers catch your eye[end if].”
(I should at least have done these as "otherwise if"s. Pretty unwieldy regardless!)
Checks out!
…I’m too lazy to update this long comment so far down, but yeah, it’s super helpful even though there are more elegant ways of doing things!
(I got hung up on the “concealed” vs. “undescribed” thing for a long, long time, I should say – it’s a pretty unintuitive part of the language IMO).
Thanks for flagging this – never came across it but sounds fun!