Love small TTRPG adventures!

The hardest thing in making them, imho, is keeping descriptions concise while still grabbing the GMs imagination.  I've been using small descriptive words / sentences, but am always second-guessing myself when I've trimmed too much fat. Short, descriptive, playable. That's the goal. Short description give a GM some wiggle room as well, though you can skew towards too much. One example:

"Loam: Beefy. Guards the mine. Falls asleep every night, to his shame."

---

How do you keep your sentences short and sweet? Any special techniques?

I think for me it's really about getting rid of my coping filler words. Every time I start adding a "maybe" or "possibly" and I JUST NEED TO COMMIT. Here's a cool article on it from a writing advice blog I like a lot:

https://mythcreants.com/blog/ninety-nine-words-to-seek-and-destroy/

I've been trying to approach it the same way I do poetry writing. Which means the goal is to efficiently evoke feelings using highly specific and unexpected language. So it's not just about being short and descriptive, it's about making that short description do a lot of work. You want to leave space for people to fill in the edges themselves, but you also want to give them interesting edges to fill in, if that makes sense. 

I don't know that I'm always that good at all that, but I find it a helpful way to look at things. 

Here's an example from what I've been working on for this jam:

"The Orchard: Bordered by the verdant fog, the trees compete for air and sunlight, growing ever-more decadent fruits to tempt the newly created."

I like your example above, by the way! I think the "to his shame" bit at the end especially injects some compelling emotion and motivation into it. 

I am really just starting to fall in love with the 1-page format, so I am still finding my way when it comes to text economy.

My big thing I am hammering as I iterate on them is to be wordy when it makes the most impact to be wordy and back off the rest of the time. Figure out where you just need to use some text.

I am really trying to get better about using tables, grey boxes and other layout tricks to getting the most out of the space you have on a single page. 

My real concern right now as I am wrapping up my first adventure path of one-page adventures is being able to carry a narrative throughline across them in the limited text space I have to work with, without just cramming tiny font text on the page.