Paul Beakley  I second the TABAW (Thou Art But A Warrior) suggestion! All the drama, tragedy (and rules) of Polaris, but without frost elves!

Brand Robins  sorry, but I too was not able to slog to the end of Nobilis 2nd edition (but I was able in the first edition, at least…)

These days I refuse to read gaming manual longer than my attention span, so there are a lot of gaming text that I could list, but I don’t think it would be fair: it’s not the way they are written, it’s the number of pages.