That's going to depend on the forum module you are using.  Active Forums has an add-on module called TopPosts.  This can be configured to display any number of recent topics and/or replies from selected forums.  It is very flexible and the layout can be controlled with a template.  I believe the core forums may have something similar but I don't think it has as many options.

Thanks,

Will

I'm not very familiar with the forums module so I can't tell you a solution from that point.  I can tell you that you could use our Brillnat database accessible Text/html modules to query the forums tables in the database and display any content available there.  Check them out at Brillnat.com

They allow you to enter a querystring and any sql statement that returns a dataset to define a dataset and then ActiveHTML will allow you to format the data returned using a asp.net repeater like format to display the data in a table, a list or whatever you like.  The DBhtml module allows you to return a dataset of tokens and values and then those values will replace any of those tokens used in the HTML defined in the text of the module. 

mj