My EUIII Campaign

[Zim]

If I recall correctly you check it by hitting your faction shield in the top left corner, then the little waving flag button among those lined up at the top of the menu that opens.

It should give your prestige, ranking, and BB. BB will be shown as a fraction (first number being your level of it, second your upper limit).

For BB, the higher the worse. The upper limit changes depending on your monarchs Diplomacy rating, but is usually in the 20s or 30s. Tarnished is fine, "pretty bad" and you may get neighbors hiring privateers to harass your ports, inciting riots, or using their spies to infiltrate your own (gives some kind of penalty for actions by your own spies). "Very bad" (getting close to 20) and people are more likely to attack you, and you'll get a lot of annoying messages saying this or that country's spies did something to you. "You are hated by the whole world" (over the numerical limit) and pretty much any neighbor who isn't a vassal (very rarely, even some who are) will attack you.

I don't have all the numbers down completely, but I think you get two per province taken from the peace deals from a war, one per province taken peacefully (i.e. Diplo annexing, or inheriting someone), and a huge 6-7 if you annex a country down to their last province.

It goes down at a fixed rate per year, depending on you monarch and whichever advisors affect rep (philosphers I think, it will say when you hire them). I wouldn't start to worry unless yours was "very bad".

Creating vassals (from your land) also lowers it, at 1 rep per province they get. Losing provinces in a peace deal may lower it, I can't recall, and usually when I lose provinces I'm too angry to check to see if it lowered my bb.