An interesting layout, with interesting challenges. Here are some ideas that came to mind as I looked at it -- you might consider:

• Instead of all those distinct arrays, how about a hash-of-arrays -- what you have as array names could just be hash keys.

• You could put all the string values for loading the arrays into a plain-text data file, instead of having them in the code. A simple file format would do -- one array per line, like this "Arrayname: value | value | ..."

• For all those places where an array value includes a randomly chosen value from another array, you just need some sort of "template symbol" to mark the position of the value and the name of the array it comes from -- e.g.

  SpellsT: @_WizardSchool school | @_WizardSchool sphere
  [download]

• For places where an array value is the result of a function call, use a slightly different template symbol, where you can include function parameters where necessary:

  Aura: visible &_color | @_Emotion | @_Align
  Resist: immune | is &_roll:1d100 % magic resistant | has no resistance
  [download]

Keeping all the initialization data in its own file, separate from the code, is usually helpful for maintenance -- fixing data is different from fixing code. Here's what the code might look like for loading such data:

my %game_data;
open( IN, "<", "game_data.txt" ) or die "game_data.txt: $!";
while (<IN>) {
    chomp;
    my ( $key, @values ) = split( /\s*[:|]\s*/ );
    $game_data{$key} = [ @values ];
}
close IN;

my %init_func = {
    color = sub { my $val=some_simple_op(); return $val},
    roll = \&roll,
    ...
}

for my $key ( keys %game_data ) {
    my @replace_vals = ();
    for my $val ( @{$game_data{$key}} ) {
        if ( $val =~ /[@&]_\S+/ ) {  # need to split and process
            my @words = split ' ', $val;
            $val = '';
            for my $wrd ( @wrds ) {
                if ( $wrd =~ /\@_(\S+)/ ) {
                    my $refkey = $1;
                    if ( exists( $game_data{$refkey} )) {
                        my $n = @{$game_data{$refkey}};
                        $wrd = $game_data{$refkey}[rand $n];
                    } else {
                        warn "No $refkey in game_data for $key\n";
                    }
                }
                elsif ( $wrd =~ /\&_(\S+)/ ) {
                    my ( $refkey, @args ) = split /[:,]/, $1;
                    if ( exists( $init_func{$refkey} )) {
                        $wrd = $init_func{$refkey}->(@args);
                    } else {
                        warn "No $refkey function for $key\n";
                    }
                }
                $val .= "$wrd ";
            }
        }
        push @replace_vals, $val;
    }
    $game_data{$key} = [ @replace_vals ];
}
[download]

You'll probably want to tweak that to suite your tastes for notations and additional flexibility (and I haven't tried testing it, so it may need some fixing as well).

There is one likely (possibly vexing) downside to this approach: the sequence in which %game_data elements are initialized (replacement values put in as needed) will matter, e.g. if a key/array "foo" depends on values from key/array "bar", which depends on values from "glub", etc. If "foo" elements get processed first, they will contain "unprocessed" strings from the "bar" list.

To get around that, the data file would need to be ordered according to "primitive sets first", "first-order dependencies next", etc, so that any line with "template symbol" references to arrays is guaranteed to come after the arrays that it references.

In that case, you'll need to move the logic for parsing and replacement of values into the "while" loop that reads the file. The for ( keys %game_data ) loop that I suggested above would do them in random order, which would probably do the wrong thing.

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