Hi and sorry for the late answer!
So funny thing, 'The Promised Land' was built before we knew of the functionality of the story parts and that it was possible to merge them over from story to a reference manual. We thought that the standard was to make everything into the reference manual and hence that's what we did. I haven't seen any way to convert it from reference manual into story entries so I'm not sure that's possible.
While I am buzy working with another ruleset, I'll take a dip into the Symbaroum ruleset this weekend to see if I can expose the die-functionality in a simple way. I think that the idea of custom weapon/armor is a way that definitely would work! So that's a really good suggestion!
Thanks,
Simon