While going over the adversaries section of the Loremaster Book I saw that the spider of Mirkwood is said to deliver it's poison with a sting??? I know that Shelob was described as having a sting, but she was a unique creature spawned of Ungoliant from the First Age. I thought maybe I had forgotten some descriptive line from The Hobbit about the spiders the Company faced, giving them the same ability. Getting my copy of The Hobbit off the bookshelf I found the passage and no where found mention that the spiders stung their victims. It may be nit picky but I'd always envisioned the spiders as being like normal spiders except having been influenced by the power of the Shadow to grow to monstrous size and twisted intelligence. Perhaps the designer responsible for their write-up had the Return of the King movie on his mind with the Shelob stinging Frodo scene vividly burned into memory? I've always seen the stinger of Shelob as an unnatural unique characteristic that further underlined her status as a dark abomination, and this sort of cheapens that for me. I guess it is easily fixed for me by just amending it for my personal campaign that the 'normal' spiders bite and possibly the Great Spiders have a sting like their twisted foremothers. Ultimately I have to ask what source the devs relied on for giving the attercops their stingers?

This has a long tradition in Middle-earth RPG's. I guess it is based on the following passage in the LotR (there may be more which I don't recall on the spot):

Since the spiders in The Hobbit are exceptionally large and with unnatural behaviour, the conclusion that these creatures belong to the mentioned descendants of Shelob is logical. Along this line, giving them similar special abilities (even on a far lesser scale), inherited from her infamous mother, lies near.

Best
Tolwen

Ah, I have read the question not good enough it seems, and my first answer covers only half the topic.
AFAIK there is no description in the LotR how exactly Shelob incapacitated Frodo (e.g. the mode of application). So the spine/stinger in the movie is an interpretation of the "application apparatus". Accordingly, even if the Attercops are Shelob's descendants (which is IMO likely), we do not know whether they have such a sting or not...

Depending on how closely one see Shelob as a giant demonic spider but otherwise in morphology akin to regular spiders, she might also use her chelicerae for the application of the venom.

In regular spiders however, there are no different venoms, and the saliva applied by the chelicerae always inject digestive enzymes that dissolve the innards of the victim.

A stinger with the ability to apply a paralyzing venom is more reminiscent of ichneumonid wasps (the model for the Alien of SF fame) - and they have a distinct apparatus for this.

In summary, the movie represenation is reminiscent of a mix of different real-world animal models (spiders and parasitoid wasps) for Shelob's abilities.

A conservative interpretation might stick to "chelicerae", but with the ability to choose the specific venom to be applied.

What remains however, is the way how Shelob came so close to Frodo (apparently unnoticed) to apply this venom precisely to his neck (probably from behind, but this is not documented). Using chelicerae for this is a bit hard to imagine, as they are close to the body and it would probably be hard not to notice the whole creature so close by. Here a dedicated stinger like in the movies would greatly help to apply a surprising sting from a distance better suited to going unnoticed long enough for the sting. Of course such a distance is relative ...

Best
Tolwen

Am I to understand that you are saying that spiders don't possess venom but only inject digestive enzymes into their prey? I have scanned information from a variety of sources and they all show that spiders possess venom glands that produce the poison they inject via their fangs. Perhaps I have misunderstood your statement.

I do not doubt that Shelob had a stinger as the passage about her in RotK clearly uses that terminology in the description. I'm surprised by the description of the lesser spiders having stingers because I didn't remember any mention of it in The Hobbit. If they did I would think this would be an important detail. Finding a giant spider in the woods that used a stinger to poison its prey would be as noteworthy a detail of an encounter as coming across a snake in the forest that had a stinger on it's tail that injected venom. Both are things that someone familiar with the typical creature would find notably surprising, even in an atypical specimen.

Anyway not to make too big an issue of this, I was really looking for any support from the works to back the spiders of Mirkwood having stingers directly, rather than speculation based on the point that they were descended from Shelob.

While pouring over this information I came across another puzzle from the Loremaster Book concerning the spiders that carries over to a wider topic. In the combat summary specifically on page 50 there is an example of a spider attacking The Bride with ensnare for a Seize Victim ability and immediately after succeeding follows this up with a Sting attack. Later in a different case another spider uses the same ensnare attack and Seizes Victim on Beran successfully but has to wait until next round to sting him. This puzzles me on several levels. Firstly, how many attacks may adversaries make in a round, I was assuming they only made one, however the example with the Bride counters this. Further, why couldn't the spider engaging Beran do in kind to him what had been done to The Bride? Both Bride and Beran were in identical stances, Forward, and both were directly facing assigned spiders one on one. What makes them different, am I missing a detail, rules issue, or just an arbitrary decision by the Loremaster in the example?

Thanks for any and all answers.

Considering the movie, I've always thought it unlikely that Frodo could survive such a sting (apparatus ). Surely he would be missing half his torso after the sting went through it?

It's to do with the abilities of the Attercops (LMB pg. 75) and the degree of success. The attack against The Bride succeeds with an extraordinary success, triggering the sting attack. The attack against Beran is a hit, but no additional successes (no 6s rolled), hence the sting must wait until the next attack.

Valarian, I guess I needed to read the fine print in the description of the attacks for the spiders in the adversary section. After flipping to their write-up I immediately found the info that answers this. Thanks for the call, and I guess I'm still feeling my way around this new rule set.

What I meant is the venom from their glands. Spider venom is a complex mixture from a variety of proteins. The function is to kill a prey (usually insects). It is not intended for simple Paralysis (though for Shelob or her descendants this can easily be assumed, due to their special nature). The later pre-digestion is done by digestive fluid regurgitated from the gut.
So you're right that I was not precise in my first answer

Here we might take into account that The Hobbit was originally not designed to be a part of Tolkien's beloved Silmarillion Middle-earth history and only later incorporated in this legendarium. Therefore, despite later edits, some inconsistencies remain. This is not to say, that there is no possibility that the Mirkwood spiders were even in the Middle-earth context meant to be without a stinger.

Best
Tolwen

No problem. I'm still doing the same.

None of them were better off than Fíli, and some of them were worse. Some had hardly been able to breathe at all (long noses are sometimes useful you see), and some had been more poisoned [than others].

Posioned with bites or a stinger is the real question.
I would simply rule that Attercops deliver a poison through bites and Great Spiders through a stinger.

Note that some time had elapsed since the dwarves were captured and when Bilbo finally set off to find them (after falling back asleep) so the posion level of either can be retained.

The spiders of Mirkwood don't sting. Bilbo with his sword was "the Stinging Fly," and so he names his sword Sting.

As for Shelob, "most like a spider she was." She's not exactly a spider.

Also, Tolkien frequently uses the word sting to refer to anything that sharply hurts in small places, especially in association with flies. "But arrows are no use against Ents. They hurt them, of course, and infuriate them: like stinging flies."

Giving stings to spiders is an overzealous interpretation of the books.

Are you forgetting that the spiders of Mirkwood are said to once have been descended from Shelob's brood?

The Hobbit novel does not say whether or not they have stingers - in fact it doesn't really describe them at all, beyond adjectives like "spidery" and "bulbous"; all we have is interpretation. The annoyingly unresolvable fact of the matter is that there is no one right answer - either you are in the "they are Shelob's brood so they must look like her" camp, or you are in the "Hobbit does not say they have stingers so they don't" camp. Neither answer is right, neither is wrong -TOR picked one and ran with it.

In archaic English "sting" can mean poisonous bite, as in this passage from Malory:

"Right soon came an adder out of a little heath bush, and it stung a knight on the foot. And when the knight felt him stung, he looked down and saw the adder, and then he drew his sword to slay the adder, and thought of none other harm."

So you can interpret the word however you like. I know the rules are written in modern English but it is just a thought.