Simply Including Content on the Front Page

I have a forum that I've dedicated to news.

I want to include these topics and display the message (with the appropriate parsers). I do  not want to use the news generator plugin as it generates static HTML and I'd like to keep my page as dynamic as possible.

I've tried reading through the topics here in the integration forum, and I'm really confused.

All of the topics are in forum id "2".

I'd like to generate something like this:

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Topic 1
Posted by username at date

Blah blah blah blah

Reply to this (0 replies)
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"Reply to this" would be a link to the actual forum page with that topic ID.

As I said before, I want to make it simple, so I'd like to use functions built-in to the forum itself, but the large number of posts in the integration forum here somewhat contradict each other and it seems like there's a million ways to go about this.