I've deployed the app to pear and all seems to be well.
Today I made a bunch of changes to the way character info gets generated and I had to make a few hundred changes to various xml files. I also began work on the map itself.
I've come to the conclusion that I need to completely rewrite the places.xql helper script as it's too reader-specific. I need to rewrite some of the xquery as functions. Once that is done I anticipate very rapid progress on completing the map features such that they duplicate the original map.
After that I can start working on journeys and a generic data browser which allows users to literally browse the data we've generated (places, characters, groups and events).