Bases - an unifying feature, or a complete screw-up! You choose.

So you have a great theme for your force (as Rob, Trent, Eric and I do for our AdeptiCon 09 armies); you themed the composition, you themed the colour scheme. You even wrote a story about the background of your army and its characters! And now you want to glue them to a small black disc...
Basing is often overlooked by model makers. I'm not talking about those artisans that make models for Euromilitaire, or even the greats who dominate Golden Daemons - they of course view the bases as an extension of the model they are converting/painting, and usually put as much effort in to the base as the model it will be "supporting".
No, I'm talking about you and I - Joe (or Jason!) average gamer. If you look through my blog you'll see I tend to favour straight forward bases (ie boring!) - mixed size gravel, a brown or grey dry brush scheme (usually with a spot of bleached bone in as well); depending on the theme I'll add small amounts of flock (brown or green), and occasionally I'll brush that too. Some players do even less than that, thinking that the base is "unimportant" (or maybe they are just bloody lazy) and slapping some green paint would be good enough.
Now, with the team building their armies for AdeptiCon, and the theme concept we have planned that would most definitely not be enough! We embarked on a search for a suitable basing scheme. Being the inherent slackers we are (I do have more than 90 models to paint...) our preference was for pre-cast resin bases. Here are some of the companies we researched.

Evil Mushroom
Dragon Forge (one of my favourites)
Micro Art Studios (one of the most diverse)
CMM
Armorcast
MaxiMini (they do "custom" bases)
Back 2 Base-ix

In particular we looked at Dragon Forge (Jeff Wilhelm, a free-lance sculptor and Golden Daemon winner), Micro Art Studios and Back 2 Base-ix. Trent has used B2B-ix in the past for his "undead" Eldar army. So we took a long look at those. In the end Eric and I (Rob is "off line" most of the time and will do what we ask him to!) picked the following for our Inquisitional forces:
Rubble:

Ruins:

Not only are they relatively cheap (did I mention I need about 90?), but they also support all themes in 25mm, 40mm and 60mm. My plan is to use the Ruins in the majority, with ~ 20% Rubble for some variety.

I'm not sure what Trent chose in the end.... I was pushing for these!

So get basing folks...