I believe @Nicolas has a number of gamification plugins that are quite helpful
For the second question, you'll want to create or customise an existing theme so that the topic layout is vertical.
I don't think so, unfortunately -- you'll have to make the initial call to get the topic, and then subsequent calls to grab the raw markdown. I don't think we'll be adding a way to retrieve the raw markdown at the topic level because we wouldn't have any use for it.
