For spells, you have loaded the spells tables in your DB right ? I re-discovered this point in the README when making a fresh installation to try it out.
The quest functionality requires a copy of your quest directory to work. Basically it runs a script that parses the Perl files and populates tables with the result, ready for HTML rendering. Note that I have tried it on my PEQ quests directory (you can run it in "batch" mode) and it stalled on one file so it is probably not up-to-date anymore. And I do not plan to delve into this for the moment (it is quite intricate) so if you would like to fix it you are welcome
