To join the growing consensus ... curses and horror-marking are totally manageable.
Curses are pretty common, but they don't do any harm by themselves. All they do is encourage you to rack up afflictions. Therefore, if you can deal with the afflictions, you don't need to worry about being cursed. Try Gift of Health -- it's Enchantment-5 (reasonably simple) and available to all nations. Even if your nation has no Nature mages to cast it, you can easily find some indy mages with Nature or make sure that your pretender can cast it.
Horror marks do indeed suck, but they're not common at all. In fact, as long as you stay away from horror-marking items, you'll probably be able to finish an entire game without ever getting a horror mark. Unless you're playing MP, in which case you should count on it.
When you're playing SP, Dominions 3 can effectively be played as if it were an RPG. Trot out Gift of Health, smashing SC designs, and all sorts of other goodies ... the AI hardly ever targets such things. Now, MP is a whole different game, or so I've heard....